Granite Guardian 3.0 8B vs ShieldGemma 9B
Granite Guardian 3.0 8B (2025) and ShieldGemma 9B (2024) are compact production models from IBM Research and Google DeepMind. Granite Guardian 3.0 8B ships a 8k-token context window, while ShieldGemma 9B ships a 8k-token context window. This comparison covers specs, pricing, API access, capabilities, benchmarks, input and output token costs, and production fit for coding and agent workloads. It focuses on practical selection signals rather than broad model-family marketing.
Granite Guardian 3.0 8B is safer overall; choose ShieldGemma 9B when provider fit matters.
Decision scorecard
Local evidence first| Signal | Granite Guardian 3.0 8B | ShieldGemma 9B |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | general production evaluation | general production evaluation |
| Decision fit | Classification | Classification |
| Context window | 8k | 8k |
| Cheapest output | - | - |
| Provider routes | 1 tracked | 1 tracked |
| Shared benchmarks | 0 shared | 0 shared |
Decision tradeoffs
- Local decision data tags Granite Guardian 3.0 8B for Classification.
- Local decision data tags ShieldGemma 9B for Classification.
Monthly cost at traffic
Estimate token spend from the cheapest tracked input and output route or tier on this page.
Granite Guardian 3.0 8B
Unavailable
No complete token price in local provider data
ShieldGemma 9B
Unavailable
No complete token price in local provider data
Cost delta unavailable until both models have sourced input and output token prices.
Switch friction
- Provider overlap exists on NVIDIA NIM; start route-level A/B tests there.
- Provider overlap exists on NVIDIA NIM; start route-level A/B tests there.
Specs
| Specification | ||
|---|---|---|
| Released | 2025-03-01 | 2024-07-01 |
| Context window | 8k | 8k |
| Parameters | 8B | 9B |
| Architecture | Decoder Only | Decoder Only |
| License | Apache 2.0OSI-approved | Gemma |
| Openness | Open source | Open weights |
| Weights | Unknown | Unknown |
| Code | Unknown | Unknown |
| Commercial use | Commercial use: permitted | Commercial use: conditional |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2024-04 | - |
Pricing and availability
| Pricing attribute | Granite Guardian 3.0 8B | ShieldGemma 9B |
|---|---|---|
| Input price | - | - |
| Output price | - | - |
| Providers |
Pricing not yet sourced for either model.
Capabilities
| Capability | Granite Guardian 3.0 8B | ShieldGemma 9B |
|---|---|---|
| Vision | No | No |
| Multimodal | No | No |
| Reasoning | No | No |
| JSON / Tool use | No | No |
| Structured outputs | No | No |
| Code execution | No | No |
| IDE integration | No | No |
| Computer use | No | No |
| Parallel agents | No | No |
Benchmarks
No shared benchmark scores are currently available for this pair.
Continue comparing
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Last reviewed: 2026-05-19. Data sourced from public model cards and provider documentation.