Model comparison
Grok 3 vs Mercury 2
Grok 3 and Mercury 2 score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.9 vs 39.1), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Last verified . 13 shared benchmarks.
Summary
- They share 13 benchmarks with published results for both. Grok 3 scores higher in 5 categories and Mercury 2 in 2 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Mercury 2 leads 23.8 to 13.7.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Vectara Hallucination Rate: 5.8% for Grok 3 and 12.3% for Mercury 2.
Side by side
| Grok 3 | Mercury 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | xAI | Inception |
| Noometry Index | 39.9 | 39.1 |
| Released | 2025-04-09 | 2026-02-20 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Context window | — | 128K |
| Max output | — | 50K |
| Input $ / M tokens | — | $0.25 |
| Output $ / M tokens | — | $0.75 |
| Results tracked | 40 | 17 |
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Category by category
Coding Grok 3 leads
Grok 3: 41.9 (#115), Mercury 2: 33.5 (#255)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| WeirdML | 37.2% | 43.2% |
| LMArena Coding | 1432 | 1391 |
| Aider Polyglot | 53.3% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | — | 1171 |
| SciCode | — | 38.7% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 785.58 |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Grok 3: 30.5 (#76), Mercury 2: —
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| BALROG | 29.5% | — |
Reasoning Mercury 2 leads
Grok 3: 13.7 (#333), Mercury 2: 23.8 (#170)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1434 | 1362 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 0% | — |
| SimpleBench | 36.1% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 61.3% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 5.5% | — |
| CritPt | — | 0.8% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 138.33 | — |
Math Not comparable
Grok 3: 38.0 (#145), Mercury 2: —
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 55.6% | — |
| Omni-MATH | 46.4% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1391 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 88.7% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 3.8% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 0% | — |
Knowledge Grok 3 leads
Grok 3: 46.2 (#82), Mercury 2: 36.2 (#172)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 5.8% | 12.3% |
| LMArena Expert | 1421 | 1358 |
| GPQA Diamond | 75.8% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 78.8% | — |
| Confabulations | 14.2% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 65% | — |
Multilingual Grok 3 leads
Grok 3: 52.3 (#87), Mercury 2: 46.6 (#157)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1410 | 1331 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1448 | 1417 |
| LMArena Russian | 1416 | 1304 |
| LMArena French | 1460 | — |
| LMArena German | 1431 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1387 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1373 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1417 | — |
Instruction Following Grok 3 leads
Grok 3: 75.0 (#73), Mercury 2: 70.2 (#165)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1409 | 1329 |
| IFEval | 88.4% | — |
Long Context Mercury 2 leads
Grok 3: 38.7 (#192), Mercury 2: 40.5 (#154)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1439 | 1330 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | 58.3% | — |
Writing & Preference Grok 3 leads
Grok 3: 55.8 (#141), Mercury 2: 53.8 (#155)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1426 | 1355 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1414 | 1289 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1425 | 1358 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 76.4% | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1186 | — |
| WildBench | 84.9% | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Grok 3 better than Mercury 2?
Grok 3 and Mercury 2 score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.9 vs 39.1), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Is Grok 3 or Mercury 2 better for coding?
Grok 3 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 41.9 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.
How many benchmarks do Grok 3 and Mercury 2 share?
13 benchmarks have published results for both models. Grok 3 has 40 scored results on Noometry and Mercury 2 has 17.