The AI arena is free today

Open Superagent

IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview vs Mercury 3

Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -5.9.

IBM · Inception · Updated for 2026

Which is better?

Mercury 3 leads the overall LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -5.9, ranking #98 overall.

Based on current LLM Stats indexes, shared benchmarks, pricing, and model metadata for 2026.

Choose IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview

  • you need open weights you can self-host or fine-tune

Choose Mercury 3

  • overall performance matters — it scores 36.1 and ranks #98 on LLM Stats
  • your work emphasizes reasoning and coding — it leads those capability indexes
  • you want the most recent training data — it shipped Oct 2026

At a glance

The differences that matter most.

IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview
IBM
Mercury 3
Inception
Core performance indexes
LLM Stats Score
-5.9
#384
36.1
#98
Reasoning
-5.9
#374
34.8
#103
Coding
2.8
#243
21.5
#105
Cost, coverage & limits
Benchmark wins
—
—
Input price
— / M
$0.10 / M
Output price
— / M
$0.35 / M
Context window
—
1,000,000

Individual benchmarks

12 reported for IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview · 12 for Mercury 3

No common benchmarks found

IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview and Mercury 3don't have any common benchmark datasets to compare. They may have been evaluated on different testing suites.

Human preference

Blind head-to-head votes and playground preference scores

Context Window

Maximum input and output token capacity

Only Mercury 3 specifies input context (1,000,000 tokens). Only Mercury 3 specifies output context (131,072 tokens).

IBM
IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview
Input- tokens
Output- tokens
Inception
Mercury 3
Input1,000,000 tokens
Output131,072 tokens
Thu Oct 22 2026 • llm-stats.com

License

Usage and distribution terms

IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview is licensed under Apache 2.0, while Mercury 3 uses a proprietary license.

License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.

IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview

Apache 2.0

Open weights

Mercury 3

Proprietary

Closed source

Release Timeline

When each model was launched

IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview was released on 2025-05-02, while Mercury 3 was released on 2026-10-19.

Mercury 3 is 18 months newer than IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview.

IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview

May 2, 2025

1.5 years ago

Mercury 3

Oct 19, 2026

0 days ago

1.5yr newer

Knowledge Cutoff

When training data ends

Neither model specifies a knowledge cutoff date.

Unable to compare the recency of their training data.

No cutoff dates available

Outputs Comparison

Notice missing or incorrect data?

Judge for yourself.

Run your own prompts against IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview and Mercury 3 side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.

IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview
✓ Preferred
Mercury 3
Open in Playground

FAQ

Common questions about IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview vs Mercury 3.

Which is better, IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview or Mercury 3?

Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -5.9. IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview is made by IBM and Mercury 3 is made by Inception. The best choice depends on your use case — compare their capability indexes, individual benchmarks, pricing, and limits above.

How does IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview compare to Mercury 3 in benchmarks?

IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview scores AttaQ: 86.1%, HumanEval: 82.4%, HumanEval+: 78.3%, GSM8k: 70.1%, IFEval: 63.0%. Mercury 3 scores GPQA: 89.2%, AA-LCR: 77.7%, IFBench: 76.8%, MRCR v2: 75.5%, DeepSearchQA: 71.3%.

What are the context window sizes for IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview and Mercury 3?

IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview supports an unknown number of tokens and Mercury 3 supports 1.0M tokens. A larger context window lets you process longer documents, conversations, or codebases in a single request.

What are the main differences between IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview and Mercury 3?

Key differences include LLM Stats Score (-5.9 vs 36.1), licensing (Apache 2.0 vs Proprietary). See the full comparison above for benchmark-by-benchmark results.

Who makes IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview and Mercury 3?

IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview is developed by IBM and Mercury 3 is developed by Inception.

Related comparisons