Q-CTRL Outperforms IBM and Qedma in Quantum Error Management Benchmark

An independent benchmarking study published on arXiv provides a protocol-level evaluation of commercial quantum error suppression and error mitigation software stacks.

The study, conducted by researchers from The Catholic University of America, University of Deusto, and Universidad de los Andes, compares native IBM Qiskit Runtime primitives against third-party managed pipelines in the Qiskit Functions Catalog, specifically Q-CTRL Performance Management and Qedma QESEM.

All experiments were executed on ibm_pittsburgh, a 156-qubit IBM Quantum Heron r3 superconducting processor. The benchmark evaluates two execution models: sampling tasks (bitstring counts) via Sampler interfaces, and observable expectation values via Estimator interfaces.