Compare / Granite 4.2 30B vs Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B
Granite 4.2 30B vs Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B
Updated November 2026
Verdict
Granite 4.2 30B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 65.8 vs 34.9. On the 7 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 30B wins 7 and Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B wins 0. Both need about 21.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Only Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.12 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted.
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-Coder 30B-A3B if…
- you want a hosted API rather than running it yourself
- you work with long documents
- you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)
Specifications
| Granite 4.2 30B | Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B | |
|---|---|---|
| Small LM Index | 65.8 (likely 64–67) | 34.9 (likely 32–38) |
| Lab | IBM (Granite) · United States | Alibaba (Qwen) · China |
| Released | 2026-08-07 | 2025-07-31 |
| 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 | No thinking |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| API price / 1M tokens | Self-host only | $0.12 ($0.070 in, $0.28 out) |
| Hugging Face downloads (30 days) | 32.4K | 1.3M |
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-Coder 30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro Knowledge | 77.6 | 70.6✓ |
| GPQA Diamond Knowledge | 64.4✓ | 51.6✓ |
| Humanity's Last Exam Reasoning | 11.2✓ | 3.8✓ |
| AIME Math | 89.2 | 29.7✓ |
| LiveCodeBench Coding | 75.8 | 40.3✓ |
| SWE-bench Verified Coding | ≈ 57 | 51.6 |
| Terminal-Bench Agentic | 29.2 | — |
| τ²-Bench Agentic | — | 34.5✓ |
| IFBench Instruction following | 77.2 | 32.7✓ |
| BFCL Agentic | 61.4 | — |
| MATH-500 Math | — | 89.3✓ |
| HMMT Math | 89.2 | — |
| AA-LCR Long context | 49.0✓ | 32.7✓ |
| SciCode Coding | 37.8✓ | — |
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-Coder 30B-A3B?
Granite 4.2 30B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 65.8 vs 34.9. On the 7 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 30B wins 7 and Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B wins 0.
Which is cheaper to run?
Only Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.12 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted. Both need about 21.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.
Which has the longer context window?
Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B has the longer context window: 262K tokens against 131K.
Can I use Granite 4.2 30B and Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B 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.
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