---
title: "Is Granite 4.2 8B still undominated? · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/check/ibm-granite__granite-4.2-8b/
description: "Granite 4.2 8B: whether it is still undominated. If anything in this catalogue is both better and cheaper, it is named, as of Sep 22, 2026. Unrated stays unrated."
---

# Is Granite 4.2 8B still undominated? · Undominated.ai

> Granite 4.2 8B: whether it is still undominated. If anything in this catalogue is both better and cheaper, it is named, as of Sep 22, 2026. Unrated stays unrated.

# Is Granite 4.2 8B a good deal?

Whether anything in this catalogue beats Granite 4.2 8B on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.

12 undominated of 136 · Sep 22, 2026

As of Sep 22, 2026, Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 scores higher and costs less than Granite 4.2 8B for Balanced on LMArena, but it is not a drop-in. You would give up: max output, reasoning.

 Current model

Granite 4.2 8B

 Balanced

3 tokens in per 1 out

 Balanced Summarise Chat Code gen Agentic
 Monthly spend (USD) Used only to say how many months a named switching cost would take to earn back. Leave blank to skip. Switching cost (USD) 136 rated, priced standard models. Chartreuse is the frontier. Cobalt is the model you named, when it is not on the staircase.

Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 scores 66.8 points higher and costs 22% less, but you would give up: max output, reasoning.

 [Granite 4.2 8B](/models/ibm-granite__granite-4.2-8b/)

LMArena Elo

 **

1316.8

Effective $/M · Balanced

 **

$0.107/M

 [Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507](/models/qwen__qwen3-30b-a3b-instruct-2507/)

LMArena Elo

 **

1383.6

Effective $/M · Balanced

 **

$0.084/M

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 136 rated, priced models on this lens: nothing dominates it outright, 2 more dominate it but give something up. Granite 4.2 8B scores 1316.8 at $0.11 per million tokens for this mix.

## 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 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | 1383.6 | $0.084/M | max output, reasoning |
| Gemma 3 12B | 1334.2 | $0.075/M | max output, reasoning |

Copy watch URL [Open the frontier](/frontier/)

This page does not mail you. The URL is the watch: same model, same mix, current catalogue.

## Saved decision references

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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.

Historical decisions cannot be fully replayed from saved references: past prices, scores and capability evidence are not stored.

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