Model comparison
Granite 4.2 30b vs o4-mini
Granite 4.2 30b and o4-mini score almost the same on the Noometry Index (41.8 vs 41.6), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Last verified . 11 shared benchmarks.
Summary
- They share 11 benchmarks with published results for both. Granite 4.2 30b scores higher in 3 categories and o4-mini in 4 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where o4-mini leads 43.6 to 39.1.
- Granite 4.2 30b has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Granite 4.2 30b | o4-mini | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | IBM | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 41.8 | 41.6 |
| Released | — | 2025-04-16 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |
| Context window | — | 200K |
| Max output | — | 100K |
| Input $ / M tokens | — | $1.10 |
| Output $ / M tokens | — | $4.40 |
| Results tracked | 11 | 60 |
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Category by category
Coding Too close to call
Granite 4.2 30b: 41.0 (#126), o4-mini: 40.9 (#127)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 30b | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1396 | 1368 |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 45% |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 72% |
| GSO | — | 3.6% |
| WeirdML | — | 52.6% |
| CadEval | — | 62% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 826.17 |
| AlgoTune | — | 1.72 |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Granite 4.2 30b: —, o4-mini: 32.6 (#61)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 30b | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 53.2% |
| GDPval | — | 25.3% |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 63.9% |
Reasoning Granite 4.2 30b leads
Granite 4.2 30b: 27.8 (#112), o4-mini: 24.6 (#162)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 30b | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1374 | 1351 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 6.1% |
| SimpleBench | — | 38.7% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 67.6% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 58.7% |
| CritPt | — | 0.6% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 26% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 9.2% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 5% |
| DTBench | — | 77.6% |
| LMCA | — | 26.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 145.64 |
| ForecastBench | — | 61.8 |
Math Not comparable
Granite 4.2 30b: —, o4-mini: 40.8 (#89)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 30b | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 36.1% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | — | 4.9% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 81.7% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 72% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1389 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 97.8% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 24.8% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 6.3% |
Knowledge o4-mini leads
Granite 4.2 30b: 39.1 (#138), o4-mini: 43.6 (#91)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 30b | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1406 | 1343 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 79.6% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 18.1% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 19.6% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 82% |
| Confabulations | — | 15.8% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 18.6% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 73.5% |
Multimodal Not comparable
Granite 4.2 30b: —, o4-mini: 40.2 (#49)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 30b | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1194 |
| GeoBench | — | 64% |
| VPCT | — | 57.5% |
Multilingual Too close to call
Granite 4.2 30b: 47.3 (#151), o4-mini: 47.0 (#154)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 30b | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1340 | 1337 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1414 | 1354 |
| LMArena Russian | 1343 | 1334 |
| LMArena French | — | 1364 |
| LMArena German | — | 1336 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1308 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1312 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1347 |
Instruction Following o4-mini leads
Granite 4.2 30b: 71.2 (#155), o4-mini: 75.2 (#68)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 30b | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1347 | 1321 |
| IFEval | — | 92.8% |
Long Context o4-mini leads
Granite 4.2 30b: 41.4 (#140), o4-mini: 45.5 (#33)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 30b | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1359 | 1315 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 77.8% |
Writing & Preference Too close to call
Granite 4.2 30b: 53.8 (#156), o4-mini: 54.0 (#152)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 30b | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1361 | 1353 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1288 | 1294 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1339 | 1350 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 75% |
| WildBench | — | 85.4% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Granite 4.2 30b better than o4-mini?
Granite 4.2 30b and o4-mini score almost the same on the Noometry Index (41.8 vs 41.6), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Is Granite 4.2 30b or o4-mini better for coding?
They score almost the same on coding (41.0 vs 40.9); test both on your own repository before choosing.
How many benchmarks do Granite 4.2 30b and o4-mini share?
11 benchmarks have published results for both models. Granite 4.2 30b has 11 scored results on Noometry and o4-mini has 60.