Model comparison
Mercury 2 vs Qwen3-30B-A3B
Mercury 2 and Qwen3-30B-A3B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.1 vs 38.9), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Last verified . 14 shared benchmarks.
Alibaba (Qwen)Summary
- They share 14 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2 scores higher in 2 categories and Qwen3-30B-A3B in 5 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in long context, where Mercury 2 leads 40.5 to 31.0.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is WeirdML: 43.2% for Mercury 2 and 29.8% for Qwen3-30B-A3B.
- Qwen3-30B-A3B is cheaper at $0.12 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens, against $0.25 / $0.75 for Mercury 2.
- Mercury 2 accepts more context: 128K tokens versus 41K.
- Qwen3-30B-A3B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Mercury 2 | Qwen3-30B-A3B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 39.1 | 38.9 |
| Released | 2026-02-20 | 2025-04-28 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 128K | 41K |
| Max output | 50K | 16K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.25 | $0.12 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.75 | $0.50 |
| Results tracked | 17 | 32 |
Sponsored placements are available on pages like this one. Advertise on Noometry
Category by category
Coding Qwen3-30B-A3B leads
Mercury 2: 33.5 (#255), Qwen3-30B-A3B: 37.5 (#194)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 38.7% | 33.3% |
| WeirdML | 43.2% | 29.8% |
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | 1416 |
| LMArena WebDev | 1171 | — |
| ALE-Bench | 785.58 | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Mercury 2: —, Qwen3-30B-A3B: 29.8 (#82)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 41.4% |
Reasoning Mercury 2 leads
Mercury 2: 23.8 (#170), Qwen3-30B-A3B: 22.2 (#204)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| CritPt | 0.8% | 0.3% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1362 | 1398 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 54.9% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 8% |
| DTBench | — | 69.3% |
| LMCA | — | 22.4% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 139.63 |
Math Not comparable
Mercury 2: —, Qwen3-30B-A3B: 37.4 (#157)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | — | 47.8% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 70.3% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1394 |
Knowledge Qwen3-30B-A3B leads
Mercury 2: 36.2 (#172), Qwen3-30B-A3B: 41.8 (#105)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | 1396 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 70.1% |
| Confabulations | — | 12.3% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.3% | — |
Multilingual Qwen3-30B-A3B leads
Mercury 2: 46.6 (#157), Qwen3-30B-A3B: 49.5 (#132)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1331 | 1372 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1417 | 1433 |
| LMArena Russian | 1304 | 1370 |
| LMArena French | — | 1418 |
| LMArena German | — | 1380 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1337 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1331 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1404 |
Instruction Following Qwen3-30B-A3B leads
Mercury 2: 70.2 (#165), Qwen3-30B-A3B: 72.0 (#142)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1329 | 1363 |
Long Context Mercury 2 leads
Mercury 2: 40.5 (#154), Qwen3-30B-A3B: 31.0 (#283)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1330 | 1379 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 40.6% |
Writing & Preference Qwen3-30B-A3B leads
Mercury 2: 53.8 (#155), Qwen3-30B-A3B: 55.6 (#143)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-30B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1355 | 1384 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1289 | 1317 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1358 | 1378 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 75.3% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Mercury 2 better than Qwen3-30B-A3B?
Mercury 2 and Qwen3-30B-A3B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.1 vs 38.9), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Qwen3-30B-A3B?
Qwen3-30B-A3B is cheaper. It lists at $0.12 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens; Mercury 2 lists at $0.25 and $0.75.
Is Mercury 2 or Qwen3-30B-A3B better for coding?
Qwen3-30B-A3B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 37.5 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Mercury 2 does, with 128K tokens against 41K.
How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Qwen3-30B-A3B share?
14 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3-30B-A3B has 32.