Model comparison
Granite 4.2 3b vs Qwen3 32B
Granite 4.2 3b and Qwen3 32B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.4 vs 39.2), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Last verified . 11 shared benchmarks.
Alibaba (Qwen)Summary
- They share 11 benchmarks with published results for both. Granite 4.2 3b scores higher in 2 categories and Qwen3 32B in 5 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Granite 4.2 3b leads 26.0 to 20.2.
Side by side
| Granite 4.2 3b | Qwen3 32B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | IBM | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 39.4 | 39.2 |
| Released | — | 2025-04 |
| Weights | Open | Open |
| Context window | — | 131K |
| Max output | — | 16K |
| Input $ / M tokens | — | $0.70 |
| Output $ / M tokens | — | $2.80 |
| Results tracked | 11 | 26 |
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Category by category
Coding Granite 4.2 3b leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 40.0 (#151), Qwen3 32B: 37.7 (#190)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Qwen3 32B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1361 | 1358 |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 40% |
| SciCode | — | 35.4% |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Granite 4.2 3b: —, Qwen3 32B: 32.6 (#62)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Qwen3 32B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 48.7% |
Reasoning Granite 4.2 3b leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 26.0 (#138), Qwen3 32B: 20.2 (#241)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Qwen3 32B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1306 | 1334 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 54.9% |
| CritPt | — | 0.3% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 5% |
| DTBench | — | 67.5% |
| LMCA | — | 17.3% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 138.51 |
Math Not comparable
Granite 4.2 3b: —, Qwen3 32B: 39.7 (#99)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Qwen3 32B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 66.9% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1399 |
Knowledge Qwen3 32B leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 36.3 (#171), Qwen3 32B: 40.0 (#125)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Qwen3 32B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1315 | 1362 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 65.7% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 5.9% |
Multilingual Qwen3 32B leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 42.1 (#198), Qwen3 32B: 45.6 (#167)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Qwen3 32B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1268 | 1317 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1269 | 1357 |
| LMArena Russian | 1249 | 1311 |
| LMArena German | — | 1341 |
Instruction Following Qwen3 32B leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 67.1 (#200), Qwen3 32B: 68.9 (#179)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Qwen3 32B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1273 | 1305 |
Long Context Qwen3 32B leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 39.2 (#185), Qwen3 32B: 43.8 (#87)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Qwen3 32B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1291 | 1327 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 74.2% |
Writing & Preference Qwen3 32B leads
Granite 4.2 3b: 47.2 (#212), Qwen3 32B: 52.9 (#163)
| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3b | Qwen3 32B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1293 | 1340 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1205 | 1297 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1290 | 1331 |
Frequently asked questions
Is Granite 4.2 3b better than Qwen3 32B?
Granite 4.2 3b and Qwen3 32B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.4 vs 39.2), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Is Granite 4.2 3b or Qwen3 32B better for coding?
Granite 4.2 3b scores higher on coding benchmarks: 40.0 versus 37.7 in the Noometry coding category.
How many benchmarks do Granite 4.2 3b and Qwen3 32B share?
11 benchmarks have published results for both models. Granite 4.2 3b has 11 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3 32B has 26.