# Cola2 vs Granite 4.2 3B (slim)

> Granite 4.2 3B scores 59.8 (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-4-2-3b.md (~8,800 tokens) · this version ~680 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cola2-vs-granite-4-2-3b.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cola2-vs-granite-4-2-3b
- 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 3B scores 59.8 (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 3B: C 59.8, rank #92 of 160 open-weight models · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/granite-4-2-3b.min.md
- Cola2, good for Researchers working on latent or diffusion language models who want a checkpoint to study
- Granite 4.2 3B, good for Agents on small hardware that want a permissive reasoning model for tool calls and coding, with thinking they can switch off Ahead on Reach, 95 against 25; Risk, 55 against 40; Agent interface, 85 against 20; Documentation and upkeep, 92 against 58.

| Category | Cola2 | Granite 4.2 3B |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Capability (35%) | pending | pending |
| Reach (25%) | 25 | 95 |
| Risk (20%) | 40 | 55 |
| Agent interface (10%) | 20 | 85 |
| Documentation and upkeep (10%) | 58 | 92 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Cola2 | Granite 4.2 3B |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | ByteDance (Seed) | IBM |
| Licence | None stated for the weights (the code is Apache 2.0) | Apache-2.0 |
| Last release | 2026-11-06 | 2026-10-20 |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.8/5 (4) |

Why the edge:
- Reach, Granite 4.2 3B +70: 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 3B 95 (Memory earns the full 30, since IBM's 4-bit MLX build is 2.07 GB and Ollama's Q4_K_M build 2.2 GB, about 2.5 to 2.6 GB with the fifth added.)
- Agent interface, Granite 4.2 3B +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 3B 85 (The template ships in the repository (20).)
- Documentation and upkeep, Granite 4.2 3B +34: 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 3B 92 (The card covers everything but a knowledge cut-off (17).)
- Risk, Granite 4.2 3B +15: Cola2 40 (File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25).); Granite 4.2 3B 55 (File safety gets 15 of 25, safetensors only, less 10 because the card's vLLM command loads the repository's parser plugin.)