Is Granite 4.2 8B a good deal?

As of Oct 6, 2026, Granite 4.2 8B is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. gpt-oss-120b scores 47.6 higher and costs 40% less, with a covering envelope. 12 of 145 rated, priced standard models are undominated.

Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements

gpt-oss-120b is both better and cheaper than Granite 4.2 8B: 47.6 points higher on LMArena and 40% less per million tokens, $0.043 cheaper at this mix.

Granite 4.2 8B takes text, returns up to 117,964 tokens from a 131,072-token context, and is listed by 2 sellers.

Compared against 145 rated, priced models on this lens: 1 model dominates it and gives up nothing, 2 more dominate it but give something up. Granite 4.2 8B scores 1317.8 at $0.108 per million tokens for this mix.

Envelope-safe replacements

Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.

Model	LMArena	Effective $/M	You save
gpt-oss-120b	1365.4 +47.6	$0.065/M	40%

Higher score, lower price, named losses

Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.

Model	LMArena	Effective $/M	You give up
Gemma 3 27B	1357.8	$0.100/M	reasoning
Gemma 3 12B	1334.2	$0.075/M	max output, reasoning

Copy watch URL Open the frontier

The link keeps the model and mix, using the current catalogue. Monthly spend and switching cost stay in this browser tab and are left out of the link.