Granite 4.1-3B
apache 2.0 with cryptographically signed weights — the enterprise answer at edge scale.
the most institutionally careful entry here — signed weights, plain apache 2.0, dense architecture — and much too new to have a community around it.
ibm signs the weights cryptographically, which nothing else in this ranking does. for anyone who has to answer where a model came from and whether it was tampered with in transit, that is a category of assurance the licence alone doesn't provide.
granite 4.1 also marks a real architecture change rather than a version bump: ibm moved from the hybrid state-space and moe designs of granite 4.0 nano to a pure dense line, and says the recipe lets its 8b sibling match the old 32b moe model. the 3b inherits it at about 2gb, running on a laptop cpu or a low-end gpu.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- small on-device llms
- pricing
- free (apache 2.0)
- website
- huggingface.co
the most institutionally careful entry here — signed weights, plain apache 2.0, dense architecture — and much too new to have a community around it.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.
more small on-device llms
Gemma 4 (E2B / E4B / 12B)
we checked thisfree (apache 2.0)text, images and audio on a phone, under an apache licence google took three generations to arrive at.
Qwen3.5-4B-Instruct
we checked thisfree (apache 2.0)262k of context in about three gigabytes, apache 2.0, and two generations newer than the qwen everyone links to.