Model comparison
Mercury 2 vs Mistral Large 3
Mercury 2 and Mistral Large 3 score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.1 vs 39.1), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Last verified . 13 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AISummary
- They share 13 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2 scores higher in 2 categories and Mistral Large 3 in 5 categories; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Mercury 2 leads 23.8 to 15.2.
- Both cost about the same: $0.25 input and $0.75 output per million tokens.
- Mistral Large 3 accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 128K.
- Mistral Large 3 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Mercury 2 | Mistral Large 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 39.1 | 39.1 |
| Released | 2026-02-20 | 2025-12-02 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 128K | 262K |
| Max output | 50K | 8K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.25 | $0.25 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.75 | $0.75 |
| Results tracked | 17 | 24 |
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Category by category
Coding Too close to call
Mercury 2: 33.5 (#255), Mistral Large 3: 34.4 (#237)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Large 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena WebDev | 1171 | 1230 |
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | 1448 |
| SciCode | 38.7% | — |
| WeirdML | 43.2% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 785.58 | — |
Reasoning Mercury 2 leads
Mercury 2: 23.8 (#170), Mistral Large 3: 15.2 (#319)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Large 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1362 | 1429 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 50.9% |
| NYT Connections (extended) | — | 7.5% |
| CritPt | 0.8% | — |
| Thematic Generalization | — | 23% |
Math Not comparable
Mercury 2: —, Mistral Large 3: 38.7 (#129)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Large 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | — | 1414 |
Knowledge Too close to call
Mercury 2: 36.2 (#172), Mistral Large 3: 36.0 (#177)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Large 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.3% | 14.5% |
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | 1421 |
Multimodal Not comparable
Mercury 2: —, Mistral Large 3: 38.2 (#66)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Large 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1221 |
Multilingual Mistral Large 3 leads
Mercury 2: 46.6 (#157), Mistral Large 3: 52.5 (#84)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Large 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1331 | 1413 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1417 | 1447 |
| LMArena Russian | 1304 | 1411 |
| LMArena French | — | 1455 |
| LMArena German | — | 1437 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1394 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1384 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1440 |
Instruction Following Mistral Large 3 leads
Mercury 2: 70.2 (#165), Mistral Large 3: 74.0 (#108)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Large 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1329 | 1403 |
Long Context Mistral Large 3 leads
Mercury 2: 40.5 (#154), Mistral Large 3: 43.1 (#105)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Large 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1330 | 1413 |
Writing & Preference Mistral Large 3 leads
Mercury 2: 53.8 (#155), Mistral Large 3: 60.0 (#101)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Large 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1355 | 1428 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1289 | 1386 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1358 | 1429 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1412 |
Frequently asked questions
Is Mercury 2 better than Mistral Large 3?
Mercury 2 and Mistral Large 3 score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.1 vs 39.1), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Mistral Large 3?
Mistral Large 3 is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens; Mercury 2 lists at $0.25 and $0.75.
Is Mercury 2 or Mistral Large 3 better for coding?
They score almost the same on coding (33.5 vs 34.4); test both on your own repository before choosing.
Which has the bigger context window?
Mistral Large 3 does, with 262K tokens against 128K.
How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Mistral Large 3 share?
13 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Large 3 has 24.