Model comparison
Mercury 2 vs Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct
Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct is the stronger model overall, scoring 42.5 to 38.8 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 2.3× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 12 shared benchmarks.
Alibaba (Qwen)Summary
- They share 12 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2 scores higher in 1 category and Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct in 6 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct leads 41.9 to 33.2.
- Mercury 2 is cheaper at $0.25 / $0.75 per million input/output tokens, against $0.50 / $2 for Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct.
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct accepts more context: 131K tokens versus 128K.
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Mercury 2 | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 38.8 | 42.5 |
| Released | 2026-02-20 | 2025-09 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 128K | 131K |
| Max output | 50K | 33K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.25 | $0.50 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.75 | $2 |
| Results tracked | 17 | 25 |
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Category by category
Coding Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct leads
Mercury 2: 33.2 (#250), Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 41.9 (#101)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | 1441 |
| LMArena WebDev | 1170 | — |
| SciCode | 38.7% | — |
| WeirdML | 43.2% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 785.58 | — |
Reasoning Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct leads
Mercury 2: 23.0 (#170), Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 30.1 (#79)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1362 | 1428 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 66.7% |
| CritPt | 0.8% | — |
Math Not comparable
Mercury 2: —, Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 36.3 (#118)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Omni-MATH | — | 46.7% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1440 |
Knowledge Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct leads
Mercury 2: 35.6 (#170), Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 41.3 (#102)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.3% | 9.3% |
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | 1416 |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 78.6% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 63% |
Multilingual Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct leads
Mercury 2: 46.8 (#153), Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 52.3 (#88)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1331 | 1407 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1416 | 1461 |
| LMArena Russian | 1303 | 1403 |
| LMArena French | — | 1415 |
| LMArena German | — | 1416 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1398 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1366 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1436 |
Instruction Following Too close to call
Mercury 2: 70.4 (#161), Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 71.0 (#154)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1328 | 1388 |
| IFEval | — | 81% |
Long Context Mercury 2 leads
Mercury 2: 40.4 (#149), Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 37.0 (#218)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1329 | 1403 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 55.6% |
Writing & Preference Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct leads
Mercury 2: 54.0 (#151), Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct: 58.2 (#116)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1355 | 1417 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1289 | 1333 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1358 | 1415 |
| WildBench | — | 80.7% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Mercury 2 better than Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct?
Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct is the stronger model overall, scoring 42.5 to 38.8 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 2.3× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct?
Mercury 2 is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens; Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct lists at $0.50 and $2.
Is Mercury 2 or Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct better for coding?
Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct scores higher on coding benchmarks: 41.9 versus 33.2 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct does, with 131K tokens against 128K.
How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct share?
12 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct has 25.