Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Gemma 4 E2B IT vs Granite 4.2 30B
Granite 4.2 30B and Gemma 4 E2B IT score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 60.4 (C). Gemma 4 E2B IT leads on reach and risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 4969 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Best for Agents that need a cheap, permissively licensed helper on 8 GB of memory, for tool calls, short audio or images, rather than hard reasoning
Ahead on
- Reach, 95 against 90
- Risk, 70 against 55
Watch for
No safety evaluation figures published
Best for Agents that want a documented, signed, Apache 2.0 reasoning model with tool calling on a 24 GB card
Ahead on
- Documentation and upkeep, 87 against 75
Watch for
No safety results published for it
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Risk Gemma 4 E2B IT +15
Gemma 4 E2B IT 70
File safety 25, safetensors and GGUF only, with nothing from the repository run on load. Provenance 15, the files sit in Google's own organisation and every file has a checksum. Safety evaluation 0, the card says testing showed minimal policy violations but gives no figures. Agent guidance 10, the card names the harm categories its safety training covers and asks for content-safety safeguards, and the tool guide says to validate calls, with no prompt-injection guidance. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 with no added policy, no threshold and a working link. Security programme 5, Google's security.txt and reward programme give a route to report a flaw, but no public Gemma advisories were found.
Granite 4.2 30B 55
File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, the files sit in the ibm-granite organisation, which IBM's Granite docs and the GitHub README link to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card. Agent guidance 5, General cautions. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 has no use policy, field-of-use limit, threshold or change clause, and the card's licence link resolves. Security programme 5, www.ibm.com/.well-known/security.txt names IBM PSIRT, read for the 3B listing on 4 November 2026 (5). 15 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 15 + 5 = 55.
Documentation and upkeep Granite 4.2 30B +12
Gemma 4 E2B IT 75
Model card 20, all seven items are there. Training data 10, a general description by type with a January 2025 cut-off and the filtering, but no sources, mix or sizes. Last change 20, Google merged a fix for 233 glitch tokens in tokenizer.json on 3 November 2026, a day before 4 November. Responsiveness 10, Google replied to 9 of 24 questions and reports, the last on 2026-09-15, re-counted on 4 November. Version policy 10, earlier Gemma generations keep their own repositories and gemma.ai has a dated releases page. File health 5, the files agree with the card but a report about them waits without a reply.
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 12 tested languages are on the card. Training data 20, IBM's disclosure file for the 30B lists the datasets used in pre-training and post-training as machine-readable metadata, and the card describes the three training stages. Last change 15, the last commit to the repository was on 4 September 2026, 67 days before this check. Responsiveness 20, Of the 4 discussions that aren't pull requests (28 August to 3 November 2026), 3 have a reply from an ibm-granite member. Version policy 5, Granite 4.1 30B stays in its own repository and 4.2 came out in new ones. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the architecture, the 131,072-token context and the thinking switch. 17 + 20 + 15 + 20 + 5 + 10 = 87.
Reach Gemma 4 E2B IT +5
Gemma 4 E2B IT 95
Memory 30, Google's own 4-bit QAT GGUF with its projector is 4.34 GB, which with a fifth on top is 5.2 GB and fits in 16 GB or less. Runtimes 25, released support in Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio, six of six. Builds 15, Google publishes a Q4_0 GGUF and a w4a16 build and two mobile builds, read as two kinds as for the 31B. Terms 15, plain Apache 2.0 with nothing added. Download 10, no account or gate. Hosted 0, the Gemini API serves only the two largest sizes and no inference provider lists this one.
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. Its Q4_0 GGUF is 16.58 GB and Ollama's library build granite4.2:30b 18 GB, the same band. Runtimes 25, Released versions run the granite architecture in llama.cpp (granite, b12242), vLLM (GraniteForCausalLM in the v0.33.0 registry), SGLang (granite.py at v0.5.23), Transformers (v5.22.2) and Ollama (its own granite4.2 library entry, 30b tag). Builds 15, IBM publishes FP8, MXFP4 and NVFP4 safetensors builds, a GGUF repository with Q4_0 to Q8_0 and BF16 files, and 4-bit, 8-bit and BF16 MLX builds, so quantised builds at two precisions or more. Terms 15, Apache 2.0, an OSI-approved licence, with no use policy or other terms added on the card. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for the BF16, FP8, MXFP4, NVFP4, GGUF and MLX repositories, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps one inference provider (DeepInfra, live), short of the two the line needs. 25 + 25 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 90.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Gemma 4 E2B IT | Granite 4.2 30B | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 95 | 90 | Gemma 4 E2B IT +5 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 70 | 55 | Gemma 4 E2B IT +15 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 85 | 85 | even |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 75 | 87 | Granite 4.2 30B +12 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 60.4/100 | C 61/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Gemma 4 E2B IT | Granite 4.2 30B |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | Google DeepMind | IBM |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-11-03 | 2026-09-04 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (4) | none |
Verdicts
Gemma 4 E2B IT
A small open-weight model for light agent work, tool calls, short audio and images on a phone or laptop, under Apache 2.0. Google's 4-bit build needs about 5 GB with working space and runs in all the common runtimes. Google's card puts it far below larger Gemma 4 sizes on agent and coding tasks, and no safety results are published.
Granite 4.2 30B
IBM's largest reasoning cousin, with the same strengths as the 3B. It runs in every runtime we count from IBM's own builds on a 24 GB card, is signed, plain Apache 2.0, and comes with a disclosure of its training data. No safety results are published and structured output isn't documented.
Before you call either
Gemma 4 E2B IT
- On the reference machine run
llama-server -hf google/gemma-4-E2B-it-qat-q4_0-gguf --hf-file gemma-4-E2B_q4_0-it.gguf --jinja -c 131072, and add--mmprojwith gemma-4-E2B-it-mmproj.gguf for images and audio - With Ollama run
ollama run gemma4:e2band raise num_ctx or OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH, since the default context is small and agents want at least 64K - In vLLM or SGLang pass
--tool-call-parser gemma4 --reasoning-parser gemma4(vLLM also--enable-auto-tool-choice), or tool calls come back as text; Google's w4a16 build is the 4-bit route there - Thinking is off by default; pass enable_thinking=True or start the system prompt with <|think|>, and drop earlier turns' thinking from history except on tool-call turns
- Put images before the text and audio after it, keep audio to 30 seconds and video to 60 frames, and validate tool names and arguments before running them
Granite 4.2 30B
- Start it with
ollama run granite4.2:30b, orllama-server -hf ibm-granite/granite-4.2-30b-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja - With vLLM 0.32.0 or later leave out
--reasoning-parser-plugin, since the parser is built in, and use--tool-call-parser qwen3_coder - Thinking is on by default. Pass
enable_thinkingfalse to turn it off orlow_efforttrue for short reasoning - The context is 131,072 tokens. The card's 512K extension isn't documented
- Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
- IBM recommends Granite Guardian beside it to flag risky inputs and outputs
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Gemma 4 E2B IT or Granite 4.2 30B?
Granite 4.2 30B and Gemma 4 E2B IT score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 60.4 (C). Gemma 4 E2B IT leads on reach and risk.
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Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/gemma-4-e2b-it-vs-granite-4-2-30b.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/gemma-4-e2b-it.json·/api/v1/tools/granite-4-2-30b.json - From a terminal
anchor compare gemma-4-e2b-it granite-4-2-30b(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "gemma-4-e2b-it", "b": "granite-4-2-30b"}at/mcp, no key