Model comparison
Mercury 2 vs o1
o1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.6 to 38.8 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 70× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 12 shared benchmarks.
Summary
- They share 12 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2 scores higher in 0 categories and o1 in 7 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where o1 leads 45.7 to 33.2.
- Mercury 2 is cheaper at $0.25 / $0.75 per million input/output tokens, against $15 / $60 for o1.
- o1 accepts more context: 200K tokens versus 128K.
Side by side
| Mercury 2 | o1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 38.8 | 40.6 |
| Released | 2026-02-20 | 2024-09-12 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Context window | 128K | 200K |
| Max output | 50K | 100K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.25 | $15 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.75 | $60 |
| Results tracked | 17 | 52 |
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Category by category
Coding o1 leads
Mercury 2: 33.2 (#250), o1: 45.7 (#64)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| WeirdML | 43.2% | 47.6% |
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | 1367 |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 61.7% |
| LMArena WebDev | 1170 | — |
| SciCode | 38.7% | — |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 69.7% |
| CadEval | — | 56% |
| ALE-Bench | 785.58 | — |
| HumanEval+ | — | 89% |
| MBPP+ | — | 80.2% |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Mercury 2: —, o1: 24.3 (#111)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| Cybench | — | 10% |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 51.1% |
Reasoning o1 leads
Mercury 2: 23.0 (#170), o1: 27.5 (#103)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1362 | 1372 |
| SimpleBench | — | 41.7% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 30.7% |
| CritPt | 0.8% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 15% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 5.7% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 91.6% |
| DTBench | — | 74.7% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 65.5% |
| LMCA | — | 22.3% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 141.92 |
| LiveBench | — | 75.7% |
Math Not comparable
Mercury 2: —, o1: 34.9 (#150)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 14.7% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 73.3% |
| LiveBench Math | — | 80.3% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1388 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 94.7% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 9.3% |
Knowledge o1 leads
Mercury 2: 35.6 (#170), o1: 41.5 (#101)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | 1362 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 76.8% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 8% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 41.1% |
| Confabulations | — | 11.7% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.3% | — |
Multimodal Not comparable
Mercury 2: —, o1: 33.6 (#87)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1168 |
| GeoBench | — | 80% |
| VPCT | — | 37% |
| SpatialViz-Bench | — | 41.4% |
Multilingual o1 leads
Mercury 2: 46.8 (#153), o1: 48.8 (#137)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1331 | 1359 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1416 | 1394 |
| LMArena Russian | 1303 | 1356 |
| LMArena French | — | 1343 |
| LMArena German | — | 1337 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1346 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1396 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1345 |
Instruction Following o1 leads
Mercury 2: 70.4 (#161), o1: 75.0 (#82)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1328 | 1368 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 81.5% |
Long Context o1 leads
Mercury 2: 40.4 (#149), o1: 50.3 (#9)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1329 | 1378 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 83.3% |
Writing & Preference o1 leads
Mercury 2: 54.0 (#151), o1: 55.8 (#139)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1355 | 1366 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1289 | 1347 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1358 | 1368 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 70.2% |
| LiveBench Language | — | 65.4% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Mercury 2 better than o1?
o1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.6 to 38.8 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 70× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or o1?
Mercury 2 is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens; o1 lists at $15 and $60.
Is Mercury 2 or o1 better for coding?
o1 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 45.7 versus 33.2 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
o1 does, with 200K tokens against 128K.
How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and o1 share?
12 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and o1 has 52.