IBM Granite 4.2 8B vs Qwen3.5-9B
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Granite 4.2 8B is 2.3× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Qwen3.5-9B accepts longer prompts: 262K vs 131K tokens.
- Qwen3.5-9B output costs $0.13 per 1M via Darkbloom, against the list price of $0.25.
- Granite 4.2 8B is the newer model (released 2026-08-31).
| Granite 4.2 8B | Qwen3.5-9B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | IBM | Qwen |
| Released | 2026-08-31 | 2026-03-10 |
| Input / 1M | $0.06 | $0.17 |
| Output / 1M | $0.15 | $0.25 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.015 | — |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.082 | $0.19 |
| Context | 131K | 262K |
| Max output | 118K | 236K |
| Accepts | text | text, image, video |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 2 | 6 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.15 | $0.13 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | Operational |
Cost calculator
Granite 4.2 8B
$5.85 per month$0.20 per day
Qwen3.5-9B
$13.95 per month$0.47 per day
Granite 4.2 8B saves $8.10 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Granite 4.2 8B with