IBM: Granite 4.1 8B

Granite 4.1 8B is a text-in, text-out model from IBM with a 131,072-token context window and full tool-use support. It does not support reasoning mode, and structured output support is unconfirmed. The long context ceiling makes it technically capable of processing large documents or extended conversations in a single pass, and tool calling opens it to agentic workflow integration. At $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.10 per million output tokens, this is one of the cheaper options on the market, which is its clearest argument. However, its blended benchmark score of 13.1 across only three benchmarks gives buyers limited evidence to work from; performance on coding tasks scores 12.0 and agentic tasks 17.6, but coverage is too thin to draw confident conclusions. Teams with strict budget constraints and low-stakes or internal workloads may find the price worth a trial, but anyone selecting a model for demanding production use should wait for broader benchmark data.