Compare / Granite 4.2 8B vs Ministral 3 8B

Granite 4.2 8B vs Ministral 3 8B

Updated November 2026

Verdict

Granite 4.2 8B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 63.5 vs 55.2. On the 3 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 8B wins 2 and Ministral 3 8B wins 1. Both need about 6.9 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Granite 4.2 8B is cheaper through an API: $0.082 per million tokens against $0.15.

Pick Granite 4.2 8B if…

you want the strongest model overall
you mostly write code
you need math and reasoning
API cost matters most
you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)

Pick Ministral 3 8B if…

you work with long documents
you need image input

Specifications

	Granite 4.2 8B	Ministral 3 8B
Small LM Index	63.5 (likely 62–65)	55.2 (likely 51–60)
Lab	IBM (Granite) · United States	Mistral AI · Europe
Released	2026-08-07	2025-12-02
Parameters	8B (dense)	8B (dense)
Memory at 4-bit	~6.9 GB	~6.7 GB
Context window	131K tokens	256K tokens
Input	text	text, image
Reasoning	No thinking	Hybrid (thinking on/off)
License	Apache-2.0	Apache-2.0
API price / 1M tokens	$0.082 ($0.060 in, $0.15 out)	$0.15 ($0.15 in, $0.15 out)
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	71.2K	16.3K

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 8B	Ministral 3 8B
MMLU-Pro Knowledge	74.0	≈ 76
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	64.1	66.8
AIME Math	86.7	78.7
LiveCodeBench Coding	73.2	61.6
Terminal-Bench Agentic	20.6	—
IFBench Instruction following	79.3	—
BFCL Agentic	52.4	—
HMMT Math	78.3	—

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 8B or Ministral 3 8B?

Granite 4.2 8B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 63.5 vs 55.2. On the 3 benchmarks both labs report, Granite 4.2 8B wins 2 and Ministral 3 8B wins 1.

Which is cheaper to run?

Granite 4.2 8B is cheaper through an API: $0.082 per million tokens against $0.15. Both need about 6.9 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.

Which has the longer context window?

Ministral 3 8B has the longer context window: 256K tokens against 131K.

Can I use Granite 4.2 8B and Ministral 3 8B 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.