The need for parallel programming models that are simple to use and at the same time efficient for current ant future parallel platforms has led to recent attention to task-based models such as Cilk++, Intel TBB and the task concept in OpenMP version 3.0. The choice of model and implementation can have a major impact on the final performance and in order to understand some of the trade-offs we have made a quantitative study comparing four implementations of OpenMP (gcc, Intel icc, Sun studio and the research compiler Mercurium/nanos mcc), Cilk++ and Wool, a high-performance task-based library developed at SICS. Abstract. We use microbenchmarks to characterize costs for task-creation and stealing and the Barcelona OpenMP Tasks Suite for characterizing application performance. By far Wool and Cilk++ have the lowest overhead in both spawning and stealing tasks. This is reflected in application performance when many tasks with small granularity are spawned where Cilk++ and, in particular, has the highest performance. For coarse granularity applications, the OpenMP implementations have quite similar performance as the more light-weight Cilk++ and Wool except for one application where mcc is superior thanks to a superior task scheduler. Abstract. The OpenMP implemenations are generally not yet ready for use when the task granularity becomes very small. There is no inherent reason for this, so we expect future implementations of OpenMP to focus on this issue.