Granite 4.2 8B vs Qwen3 Coder Next
Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 8B by IBM or Qwen3 Coder Next by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-09-22.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Granite 4.2 8B
Qwen3 Coder Next vs Granite 4.2 8B: 17.1% less intelligence, 797.4% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 76.6% faster end-to-end.
| Metric | Granite 4.2 8B | Qwen3 Coder Next | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 11.1 | 9.2 | −17.1% Qwen3 Coder Next is 17.1% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $53.07 | $476.23 | +797.4% Qwen3 Coder Next is 9.0× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 29.67s | 6.95s | −76.6% Qwen3 Coder Next is 76.6% faster |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.06 / $0.25 | $0.35 / $1.20 | |
| Input modalities | Text | Text |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Granite 4.2 8B is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-5.6 Luna (medium) scores 25.00 for $44.3.
- Qwen3 Coder Next is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 46.30 for $207.
Granite 4.2 8BQwen3 Coder NextToday's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model
Matchup
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Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-8b/qwen3-coder-next · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-8b/qwen3-coder-next?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill