Model comparison
Mercury 2 vs Sonar
Mercury 2 and Sonar score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.1 vs 38.5), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Last verified . 0 shared benchmarks.
PerplexitySummary
- Mercury 2 is cheaper at $0.25 / $0.75 per million input/output tokens, against $1 / $1 for Sonar.
Side by side
| Mercury 2 | Sonar | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Perplexity |
| Noometry Index | 39.1 | 38.5 |
| Released | 2026-02-20 | 2024-01-01 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Context window | 128K | 128K |
| Max output | 50K | 4K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.25 | $1 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.75 | $1 |
| Results tracked | 17 | 7 |
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Category by category
Coding Sonar leads
Mercury 2: 33.5 (#255), Sonar: 35.7 (#221)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena WebDev | 1171 | — |
| SciCode | 38.7% | — |
| WeirdML | 43.2% | — |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 35.1% |
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | — |
| ALE-Bench | 785.58 | — |
Reasoning Mercury 2 leads
Mercury 2: 23.8 (#170), Sonar: 21.1 (#227)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| CritPt | 0.8% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 46.3% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1362 | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 37.9% |
| LiveBench | — | 46.9% |
Math Not comparable
Mercury 2: —, Sonar: 33.7 (#200)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Math | — | 41.6% |
Knowledge Not comparable
Mercury 2: 36.2 (#172), Sonar: —
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.3% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | — |
Multilingual Not comparable
Mercury 2: 46.6 (#157), Sonar: —
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1331 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1417 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1304 | — |
Instruction Following Sonar leads
Mercury 2: 70.2 (#165), Sonar: 71.4 (#150)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 76.2% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1329 | — |
Long Context Not comparable
Mercury 2: 40.5 (#154), Sonar: —
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1330 | — |
Writing & Preference Mercury 2 leads
Mercury 2: 53.8 (#155), Sonar: 52.6 (#167)
| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1355 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1289 | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1358 | — |
| LiveBench Language | — | 44.1% |
Frequently asked questions
Is Mercury 2 better than Sonar?
Mercury 2 and Sonar score almost the same on the Noometry Index (39.1 vs 38.5), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Sonar?
Mercury 2 is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens; Sonar lists at $1 and $1.
Is Mercury 2 or Sonar better for coding?
Sonar scores higher on coding benchmarks: 35.7 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Both accept 128K tokens.
How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Sonar share?
0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Sonar has 7.