Compare / Granite 4.2 30B vs Qwen3 30B-A3B Thinking 2507
Granite 4.2 30B vs Qwen3 30B-A3B Thinking 2507
Updated November 2026
Verdict
Granite 4.2 30B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 67.0 vs 59.3. On the 5 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 30B wins 3 and Qwen3 30B-A3B Thinking 2507 wins 2. Both need about 21.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Neither model has a hosted API on OpenRouter, so you would run both yourself.
Pick Granite 4.2 30B if…
- you want the strongest model overall
- you mostly write code
- you need math and reasoning
- you need precise instruction following
Pick Qwen3 30B-A3B Thinking 2507 if…
- you work with long documents
Specifications
| Granite 4.2 30B | Qwen3 30B-A3B Thinking 2507 | |
|---|---|---|
| Small LM Index | 67.0 (likely 66–69) | 59.3 (likely 55–63) |
| Lab | IBM (Granite) · United States | Alibaba (Qwen) · China |
| Released | 2026-08-07 | 2025-07-30 |
| Parameters | 30B (dense) | 30.5B (3.3B active, MoE) |
| Memory at 4-bit | ~21.4 GB | ~20.4 GB |
| Context window | 131K tokens | 262K tokens |
| Input | text | text |
| Reasoning | No thinking | Always thinks |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| API price / 1M tokens | Self-host only | Self-host only |
| Hugging Face downloads (30 days) | 32K | 66.6K |
Benchmarks
Higher is better. Bold marks the winner where both labs report a score. ≈ marks the index model's estimate for a score that wasn't reported, ✓ an independent measurement and * a score measured by another lab.
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 30B | Qwen3 30B-A3B Thinking 2507 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro Knowledge | 77.6 | 80.9 |
| GPQA Diamond Knowledge | 66.4 | 73.4 |
| Humanity's Last Exam Reasoning | ≈ 15 | 9.8 |
| AIME Math | 89.2 | 85.0 |
| LiveCodeBench Coding | 75.8 | 66.0 |
| SWE-bench Verified Coding | ≈ 58 | 22.0* |
| Terminal-Bench Agentic | 29.2 | — |
| IFBench Instruction following | 77.2 | 51.5 |
| BFCL Agentic | 61.4 | — |
| HMMT Math | 89.2 | — |
Scores are mostly reported by each lab with its own settings, so small gaps are noise. See the methodology. Open in the interactive comparison to add more models.
Questions
Which is better, Granite 4.2 30B or Qwen3 30B-A3B Thinking 2507?
Granite 4.2 30B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 67.0 vs 59.3. On the 5 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 30B wins 3 and Qwen3 30B-A3B Thinking 2507 wins 2.
Which is cheaper to run?
Neither model has a hosted API on OpenRouter, so you would run both yourself. Both need about 21.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.
Which has the longer context window?
Qwen3 30B-A3B Thinking 2507 has the longer context window: 262K tokens against 131K.
Can I use Granite 4.2 30B and Qwen3 30B-A3B Thinking 2507 commercially?
Both are released under the Apache-2.0 license. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.