Model comparison
Mercury 2.5 vs Qwen3-30B-A3B
Qwen3-30B-A3B is the stronger model overall, scoring 38.9 to 33.5 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2.5 costs 3.2× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3-30B-A3B's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 2 shared benchmarks.
Alibaba (Qwen)Summary
- They share 2 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2.5 scores higher in 2 categories and Qwen3-30B-A3B in 1 category; 2 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Qwen3-30B-A3B leads 37.4 to 23.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is SciCode: 38.5% for Mercury 2.5 and 33.3% for Qwen3-30B-A3B.
- Mercury 2.5 is cheaper at $0.04 / $0.15 per million input/output tokens, against $0.12 / $0.50 for Qwen3-30B-A3B.
- Mercury 2.5 accepts more context: 260K tokens versus 41K.
- Qwen3-30B-A3B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Mercury 2.5 | Qwen3-30B-A3B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 33.5 | 38.9 |
| Released | 2026-09-08 | 2025-04-28 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 260K | 41K |
| Max output | 66K | 16K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.04 | $0.12 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.15 | $0.50 |
| Results tracked | 4 | 32 |
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Category by category
Coding Mercury 2.5 leads
Mercury 2.5: 39.5 (#156), Qwen3-30B-A3B: 37.5 (#194)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 38.5% | 33.3% |
| WeirdML | — | 29.8% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1416 |
| ALE-Bench | 301.65 | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Qwen3-30B-A3B: 29.8 (#82)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 41.4% |
Reasoning Too close to call
Mercury 2.5: 22.4 (#193), Qwen3-30B-A3B: 22.2 (#204)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| CritPt | 0% | 0.3% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 54.9% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 8% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1398 |
| DTBench | — | 69.3% |
| LMCA | — | 22.4% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 139.63 |
Math Qwen3-30B-A3B leads
Mercury 2.5: 23.3 (#272), Qwen3-30B-A3B: 37.4 (#157)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | — | 47.8% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 70.3% |
| ProofBench | 3% | — |
| LMArena Math | — | 1394 |
Knowledge Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Qwen3-30B-A3B: 41.8 (#105)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 70.1% |
| Confabulations | — | 12.3% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1396 |
Multilingual Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Qwen3-30B-A3B: 49.5 (#132)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1372 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1433 |
| LMArena French | — | 1418 |
| LMArena German | — | 1380 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1337 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1331 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1370 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1404 |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Qwen3-30B-A3B: 72.0 (#142)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1363 |
Long Context Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Qwen3-30B-A3B: 31.0 (#283)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 40.6% |
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1379 |
Writing & Preference Not comparable
Mercury 2.5: —, Qwen3-30B-A3B: 55.6 (#143)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1384 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1317 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 75.3% |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1378 |
Frequently asked questions
Is Mercury 2.5 better than Qwen3-30B-A3B?
Qwen3-30B-A3B is the stronger model overall, scoring 38.9 to 33.5 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2.5 costs 3.2× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3-30B-A3B's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Mercury 2.5 or Qwen3-30B-A3B?
Mercury 2.5 is cheaper. It lists at $0.04 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens; Qwen3-30B-A3B lists at $0.12 and $0.50.
Is Mercury 2.5 or Qwen3-30B-A3B better for coding?
Mercury 2.5 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 39.5 versus 37.5 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Mercury 2.5 does, with 260K tokens against 41K.
How many benchmarks do Mercury 2.5 and Qwen3-30B-A3B share?
2 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2.5 has 4 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3-30B-A3B has 32.