The closest alternative to Granite 4.1 8B is Llama 3.1 70B Instruct — comparable intelligence (12.5 vs 12.4); for a cheaper option, Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) runs Free/M vs $0.050/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
Llama 3.1 70B Instruct is the closest alternative to Granite 4.1 8B, with an Intelligence Index of 12.5 (Granite 4.1 8B scores 12.4) at $0.400 per million input tokens.
Yes — Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) costs Free per million input tokens versus $0.050 for Granite 4.1 8B, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Granite 4.1 8B — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.