# Granite 4.2 3B vs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

> Side-by-side benchmark comparison for Granite 4.2 3B and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, multilingual, and math tasks.

- Canonical page: https://benchlm.ai/compare/granite-4-2-3b-vs-qwen3-6-35b-a3b
- Last updated: September 10, 2026

- Shared sourced benchmarks: 4
- HTML indexing: indexable
- Ranking lane: BenchAlign v5

## Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen3.6-35B-A3B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Granite 4.2 3B only makes more sense when its price, context window, or workload-specific category wins matter more than the overall score.

## Summary

- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B leads overall 43.82 to 43.
- The clearest category separation is in reasoning, where the averages are 37.7 for Granite 4.2 3B and 70.3 for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B.
- The biggest single benchmark swing is GPQA in Knowledge, with scores of 54.8% and 86%.
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B also has the larger context window at 262K.

## Model Snapshot

| Property | Granite 4.2 3B | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B |
|----------|----------|----------|
| Creator | IBM | Alibaba |
| Type | Open Weight | Open Weight |
| Reasoning | Reasoning | Reasoning |
| Context | 128K | 262K |
| Overall Score | null | 43.82 |
| Benchmarks Covered | 9 | 41 |
| Pricing (input/output) | $0.00 / $0.00 | N/A |

## Category Breakdown

### Agentic

- Winner: Coming soon
- Granite 4.2 3B public-lane score: Coming soon
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B public-lane score: 40.1 (Estimated · #115/152)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3B | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| τ³-bench results | 45.8% | 67.2% | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B |
| BFCL v4 | 52.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | Coming soon | 51.5% | Coming soon |
| Claw-Eval | Coming soon | 68.7% | Coming soon |
| QwenClawBench | Coming soon | 52.6% | Coming soon |
| QwenWebBench | Coming soon | 1397 | Coming soon |
| VITA-Bench | Coming soon | 35.6% | Coming soon |
| DeepPlanning | Coming soon | 25.9% | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon | Coming soon | 26.9% | Coming soon |
| MCP Atlas | Coming soon | 62.8% | Coming soon |
| WideResearch | Coming soon | 60.1% | Coming soon |
| Gert Labs | Coming soon | 42.65% | Coming soon |

### Coding

- Winner: Coming soon
- Granite 4.2 3B public-lane score: Coming soon
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B public-lane score: 44.9 (Estimated · #90/151)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3B | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| LiveCodeBench v6 | 69.7% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| SciCode | 24.1% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| SWE-bench Verified | Coming soon | 73.4% | Coming soon |
| SWE Multilingual | Coming soon | 67.2% | Coming soon |
| SWE-bench Pro | Coming soon | 49.5% | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | Coming soon | 51.5% | Coming soon |
| LiveCodeBench | Coming soon | 80.4% | Coming soon |
| NL2Repo | Coming soon | 29.4% | Coming soon |

### Multimodal & Grounded

- Winner: Coming soon
- Granite 4.2 3B public-lane score: Coming soon
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B public-lane score: 50.1 (#37/48)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3B | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| MMMU | Coming soon | 81.7% | Coming soon |
| MMMU-Pro | Coming soon | 75.3% | Coming soon |
| RealWorldQA | Coming soon | 85.3% | Coming soon |
| OmniDocBench 1.5 | Coming soon | 89.9% | Coming soon |
| CharXiv | Coming soon | 78% | Coming soon |
| SimpleVQA | Coming soon | 58.9% | Coming soon |
| CC-OCR | Coming soon | 81.9% | Coming soon |
| AI2D_TEST | Coming soon | 92.7% | Coming soon |
| RefCOCO (avg) | Coming soon | 92.0% | Coming soon |
| ODINW13 | Coming soon | 50.8% | Coming soon |
| Video-MME (with subtitle) | Coming soon | 86.6% | Coming soon |
| Video-MME (w/o subtitle) | Coming soon | 82.5% | Coming soon |
| VideoMMMU | Coming soon | 83.7% | Coming soon |
| MLVU (M-Avg) | Coming soon | 86.2% | Coming soon |

### Reasoning

- Winner: Coming soon
- Granite 4.2 3B public-lane score: 37.7 (Unranked · 2 rankable rows)
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B public-lane score: 70.3 (Unranked · 2 rankable rows)

### Knowledge

- Winner: Coming soon
- Granite 4.2 3B public-lane score: Coming soon
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B public-lane score: 44.2 (Estimated · #116/183)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3B | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| GPQA | 54.8% | 86% | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B |
| MMLU-Pro | 67.8% | 85.2% | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B |
| SuperGPQA | Coming soon | 64.7% | Coming soon |
| C-Eval | Coming soon | 90% | Coming soon |
| HLE | Coming soon | 21.4% | Coming soon |

### Instruction Following

- Winner: Coming soon
- Granite 4.2 3B public-lane score: Coming soon
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B public-lane score: 78.3 (#57/123)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3B | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| IFBench | 74.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

### Mathematics

- Winner: Coming soon
- Granite 4.2 3B public-lane score: Coming soon
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B public-lane score: 71.5 (Unranked · 5 rankable rows)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 3B | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| AIME 2025 | 78.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HMMT Feb 2025 | 66.7% | 90.7% | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B |
| HMMT Nov 2025 | Coming soon | 89.1% | Coming soon |
| HMMT Feb 2026 | Coming soon | 83.6% | Coming soon |
| MMAnswerBench | Coming soon | 78.9% | Coming soon |
| AIME26 | Coming soon | 92.7% | Coming soon |

## FAQ

### Which is better overall, Granite 4.2 3B or Qwen3.6-35B-A3B?

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is ahead overall on BenchLM right now.

### Where is the biggest gap between Granite 4.2 3B and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B?

The widest category gap is in reasoning, where the averages are 37.7 for Granite 4.2 3B and 70.3 for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B.

### How many benchmarks does Granite 4.2 3B cover on BenchLM?

Granite 4.2 3B currently has 9 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

### How many benchmarks does Qwen3.6-35B-A3B cover on BenchLM?

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B currently has 41 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

## Related Comparisons

- [Granite 4.2 3B vs Granite 4.2 8B](/compare/granite-4-2-3b-vs-granite-4-2-8b)
- [Qwen3.6-35B-A3B vs Granite 4.2 8B](/compare/granite-4-2-8b-vs-qwen3-6-35b-a3b)
- [Granite 4.2 3B vs Granite 4.2 30B](/compare/granite-4-2-30b-vs-granite-4-2-3b)
- [Qwen3.6-35B-A3B vs Granite 4.2 30B](/compare/granite-4-2-30b-vs-qwen3-6-35b-a3b)

## Explore More

- [Granite 4.2 3B profile](/models/granite-4-2-3b)
- [Qwen3.6-35B-A3B profile](/models/qwen3-6-35b-a3b)
- [Compare Pricing](/llm-pricing)
- [Alternative Finder](/tools/alternative-finder)
- [LLM Selector](/tools/llm-selector)
- [Overall Rankings](/best/overall)