# Cola2 vs Granite 4.2 30B (slim)

> Granite 4.2 30B scores 61 (C) to Cola2's 33.9 (F) for open-weight models you run yourself. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cola2-vs-granite-4-2-30b.md (~9,100 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cola2-vs-granite-4-2-30b.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cola2-vs-granite-4-2-30b
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-10
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Granite 4.2 30B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Cola2's 33.9 (F), and leads in every scored category. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

- Cola2: F 33.9, rank #160 of 160 open-weight models · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/cola2.min.md
- Granite 4.2 30B: C 61, rank #65 of 160 open-weight models · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/granite-4-2-30b.min.md
- Cola2, good for Researchers working on latent or diffusion language models who want a checkpoint to study
- Granite 4.2 30B, good for Agents that want a documented, signed, Apache 2.0 reasoning model with tool calling on a 24 GB card Ahead on Reach, 90 against 25; Risk, 55 against 40; Agent interface, 85 against 20; Documentation and upkeep, 87 against 58.

| Category | Cola2 | Granite 4.2 30B |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Capability (35%) | pending | pending |
| Reach (25%) | 25 | 90 |
| Risk (20%) | 40 | 55 |
| Agent interface (10%) | 20 | 85 |
| Documentation and upkeep (10%) | 58 | 87 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Cola2 | Granite 4.2 30B |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | ByteDance (Seed) | IBM |
| Licence | None stated for the weights (the code is Apache 2.0) | Apache-2.0 |
| Last release | 2026-11-06 | 2026-09-04 |

Why the edge:
- Reach, Granite 4.2 30B +65: Cola2 25 (Memory 15, the only build is the F32 safetensors set, 35.07 GB, and 35.07 GB × 1.2 = 42.1 GB, within 64 GB.); Granite 4.2 30B 90 (Memory 25, IBM's own 4-bit MLX build granite-4.2-30b-q4-mlx is 16.47 GB, and 16.47 GB × 1.2 = 19.8 GB, which fits 24 GB but not 16 GB.)
- Agent interface, Granite 4.2 30B +65: Cola2 20 (Chat template 20, A chat template in tokenizer_config.json (4,116 characters), which came with the Qwen3 tokenizer.); Granite 4.2 30B 85 (Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository, with roles, tools, tool responses, the thinking switch and low effort.)
- Documentation and upkeep, Granite 4.2 30B +29: Cola2 58 (Model card 8, Intended use and limitations (the out-of-scope list, and the unconverged latent model) and the architecture are on the card and the GitHub model c…); Granite 4.2 30B 87 (Model card 17, Intended use (best for), limitations (ethical considerations and limitations), architecture, parameters (30B), context length (128K native) and 1…)
- Risk, Granite 4.2 30B +15: Cola2 40 (File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25).); Granite 4.2 30B 55 (File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25).)
