Model crosswalk
Side-by-side on price, capability and workload — three-way comparison.
Granite 3.1 8b Instruct
vs
Qwen 2.5 Coder 7b Instruct
vs
Starcoder2 15b Instruct
Granite 3.1 8b InstructA
Granite 3.1 8b Instruct
Cheapest provider—
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Qwen 2.5 Coder 7b InstructB
Qwen 2.5 Coder 7b Instruct
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$/1M output—
Starcoder2 15b InstructC
Starcoder2 15b Instruct
Cheapest provider—
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Specs and cheapest providers
| Spec | Granite 3.1 8b Instruct | Qwen 2.5 Coder 7b Instruct | Starcoder2 15b Instruct |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parameters | — | — | — |
| Context window | — | — | — |
| License | — | — | — |
| Released | — | — | — |
| Cheapest provider | |||
| Provider | — | — | — |
| Input / 1M tokens | — | — | — |
| Output / 1M tokens | — | — | — |
Benchmark comparison
No benchmark data available yet.
Editor's take
Three small models at different parameter counts — each optimized for a distinct enterprise concern: structured extraction, code-specialist completions, and auditability.
Granite 3.1 8B Instruct is IBM's enterprise-tuned 8B model, released December 2024. The 3.1 revision expanded context from 4K to 128K tokens, which is significant for RAG pipelines ingesting long documents in a single pass. IBM benchmarks show particularly strong structured-output and tool-use performance — function calling, JSON extraction, and enterprise workflow automation are where it earns its place. Licensed Apache 2.0, so production deployment carries no royalty friction. Primary hosting is IBM watsonx.ai, with some coverage on Together AI and Replicate for teams avoiding IBM Cloud lock-in.
Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B Instruct, released November 2024 by Alibaba, is purpose-built for code generation at 7 billion parameters. HumanEval performance competes with DeepSeek Coder 6.7B, and the 131K context window lets IDE plugins pass meaningful file-level context without chunking. Hosted pricing typically runs below $0.20 per million tokens, making tab-completion-at-scale economical. The Qwen license permits commercial deployment. For code-first workloads, the specialist fine-tuning produces measurably better output than generalist 8B models like Granite on autocomplete tasks.
StarCoder2 15B Instruct, from the BigCode collaboration between HuggingFace and ServiceNow, released September 2024, runs 15 billion parameters with a 16K context window. On raw HumanEval it trails Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B despite being twice the size. The model's differentiated case is training-data provenance: The Stack v2 is restricted to permissively licensed source code. In enterprise environments where a model's training data must be documented for IP and compliance review, StarCoder2's auditability is worth the benchmark trade. BigCode OpenRAIL-M is commercially usable.
Pick Granite 3.1 8B for structured extraction, function calling, and RAG pipelines where tool-use fidelity matters. Pick Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B for code autocomplete and IDE completion at scale. Pick StarCoder2 15B when your IP review process requires verifiable training-data provenance.
Compare two at a time
Frequently asked questions
- How does Granite 3.1 8b Instruct compare to Qwen 2.5 Coder 7b Instruct and Starcoder2 15b Instruct on price?
- Use the table above to compare input and output prices per 1M tokens across the cheapest available providers for each model.
- Which model is best for coding: Granite 3.1 8b Instruct, Qwen 2.5 Coder 7b Instruct, or Starcoder2 15b Instruct?
- HumanEval and other code benchmarks are shown in the table. For production code tasks, also consider context window size and provider latency.
- What is the context window for Granite 3.1 8b Instruct, Qwen 2.5 Coder 7b Instruct, and Starcoder2 15b Instruct?
- Context window sizes are listed in the Specs row of the comparison table above.
Full model details