Model comparison
Mercury 2 vs Qwen3.6 27B
Qwen3.6 27B is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.9 to 38.8 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 3.6× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3.6 27B'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 scores higher in 1 category and Qwen3.6 27B in 3 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where Qwen3.6 27B leads 52.4 to 35.6.
- Mercury 2 is cheaper at $0.25 / $0.75 per million input/output tokens, against $0.60 / $3.60 for Qwen3.6 27B.
- Qwen3.6 27B accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 128K.
- Qwen3.6 27B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Mercury 2 | Qwen3.6 27B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 38.8 | 41.9 |
| Released | 2026-02-20 | 2026-04-22 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 128K | 262K |
| Max output | 50K | 66K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.25 | $0.60 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.75 | $3.60 |
| Results tracked | 17 | 11 |
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Category by category
Coding Qwen3.6 27B leads
Mercury 2: 33.2 (#250), Qwen3.6 27B: 38.5 (#162)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 38.7% | 37.3% |
| LMArena WebDev | 1170 | — |
| WeirdML | 43.2% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | — |
| ALE-Bench | 785.58 | — |
Reasoning Qwen3.6 27B leads
Mercury 2: 23.0 (#170), Qwen3.6 27B: 24.4 (#148)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| CritPt | 0.8% | 0.9% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 22% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1362 | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 7% |
| DTBench | — | 78.1% |
| LMCA | — | 34.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 146.47 |
Math Not comparable
Mercury 2: —, Qwen3.6 27B: 47.5 (#56)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 35.1% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 91.1% |
Knowledge Qwen3.6 27B leads
Mercury 2: 35.6 (#170), Qwen3.6 27B: 52.4 (#58)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 85.9% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.3% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | — |
Multilingual Not comparable
Mercury 2: 46.8 (#153), Qwen3.6 27B: —
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1331 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1416 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1303 | — |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Mercury 2: 70.4 (#161), Qwen3.6 27B: —
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1328 | — |
Long Context Not comparable
Mercury 2: 40.4 (#149), Qwen3.6 27B: —
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1329 | — |
Writing & Preference Mercury 2 leads
Mercury 2: 54.0 (#151), Qwen3.6 27B: 50.3 (#180)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1355 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1289 | — |
| EQ-Bench 4 | — | 1026 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1358 | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Mercury 2 better than Qwen3.6 27B?
Qwen3.6 27B is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.9 to 38.8 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 3.6× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3.6 27B's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Qwen3.6 27B?
Mercury 2 is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens; Qwen3.6 27B lists at $0.60 and $3.60.
Is Mercury 2 or Qwen3.6 27B better for coding?
Qwen3.6 27B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.5 versus 33.2 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Qwen3.6 27B does, with 262K tokens against 128K.
How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Qwen3.6 27B share?
2 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.6 27B has 11.