Noometry

Model comparison

Mercury 2 vs Mistral Medium 3.5

Mistral Medium 3.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.2 to 39.1 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 8.0× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Medium 3.5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 12 shared benchmarks.

Mercury 2 Inception

39.1

Rank #175 Confirmed

Mistral Medium 3.5 Mistral AI

40.2

Rank #152 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 12 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2 scores higher in 1 category and Mistral Medium 3.5 in 6 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in reasoning, where Mercury 2 leads 23.8 to 17.3.
  • Mercury 2 is cheaper at $0.25 / $0.75 per million input/output tokens, against $1.50 / $7.50 for Mistral Medium 3.5.
  • Mistral Medium 3.5 accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 128K.
  • Mistral Medium 3.5 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Mercury 2Mistral Medium 3.5
ProviderInceptionMistral AI
Noometry Index39.140.2
Released2026-02-20—
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window128K262K
Max output50K210K
Input $ / M tokens$0.25$1.50
Output $ / M tokens$0.75$7.50
Results tracked1722

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Category by category

Coding Mistral Medium 3.5 leads

Mercury 2: 33.5 (#255), Mistral Medium 3.5: 36.0 (#213)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena WebDev11711264
LMArena Coding13911461
SciCode38.7%—
WeirdML43.2%—
ALE-Bench785.58—

Reasoning Mercury 2 leads

Mercury 2: 23.8 (#170), Mistral Medium 3.5: 17.3 (#295)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Hard Prompts13621436
Kagi LLM Benchmark—41.4%
NYT Connections (extended)—12.9%
CritPt0.8%—
Epoch Capabilities Index—141.35

Math Not comparable

Mercury 2: —, Mistral Medium 3.5: 39.1 (#113)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Math—1431

Knowledge Mistral Medium 3.5 leads

Mercury 2: 36.2 (#172), Mistral Medium 3.5: 40.0 (#126)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Expert13581432
Vectara Hallucination Rate12.3%—

Multimodal Not comparable

Mercury 2: —, Mistral Medium 3.5: 38.3 (#65)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Vision—1223

Multilingual Mistral Medium 3.5 leads

Mercury 2: 46.6 (#157), Mistral Medium 3.5: 51.9 (#100)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Non-English13311404
LMArena Chinese14171442
LMArena Russian13041395
LMArena French—1448
LMArena German—1451
LMArena Korean—1385
LMArena Spanish—1409

Instruction Following Mistral Medium 3.5 leads

Mercury 2: 70.2 (#165), Mistral Medium 3.5: 74.6 (#90)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Instruction Following13291415

Long Context Mistral Medium 3.5 leads

Mercury 2: 40.5 (#154), Mistral Medium 3.5: 43.2 (#103)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Longer Query13301415

Writing & Preference Mistral Medium 3.5 leads

Mercury 2: 53.8 (#155), Mistral Medium 3.5: 58.5 (#117)

BenchmarkMercury 2Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Text13551421
LMArena Creative Writing12891374
LMArena Multi-Turn13581423
EQ-Bench 4—993

Frequently asked questions

Is Mercury 2 better than Mistral Medium 3.5?

Mistral Medium 3.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.2 to 39.1 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 8.0× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Medium 3.5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Mistral Medium 3.5?

Mercury 2 is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens; Mistral Medium 3.5 lists at $1.50 and $7.50.

Is Mercury 2 or Mistral Medium 3.5 better for coding?

Mistral Medium 3.5 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 36.0 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Medium 3.5 does, with 262K tokens against 128K.

How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Mistral Medium 3.5 share?

12 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Medium 3.5 has 22.

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