Model comparison

Mercury vs Phi-4

Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 31.2 on the Noometry Index.

Last verified . 8 shared benchmarks.

Mercury Inception

37.6

Rank #199 Confirmed

Phi-4 Microsoft

31.2

Rank #279 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 8 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury scores higher in 5 categories and Phi-4 in 1 category; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mercury leads 46.2 to 40.5.
  • Phi-4 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Mercury and Phi-4 specifications
MercuryPhi-4
ProviderInceptionMicrosoft
Noometry Index37.631.2
Released—2024-12-11
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window—128K
Max output—4K
Input $ / M tokens—$0.07
Output $ / M tokens—$0.14
Results tracked937

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Category by category

Coding Mercury leads

Mercury: 38.7 (#170), Phi-4: 34.4 (#239)

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkMercuryPhi-4
LMArena Coding13221231
BigCodeBench Instruct—45.5%
LiveBench Coding—30.7%
BigCodeBench Complete—55.4%

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Mercury: —, Phi-4: 22.8 (#128)

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
BenchmarkMercuryPhi-4
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard—28.8%
BALROG—11.6%

Reasoning Too close to call

Mercury: 17.5 (#293), Phi-4: 17.7 (#291)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkMercuryPhi-4
LMArena Hard Prompts12851220
Kagi LLM Benchmark21.6%—
Chess Puzzles—1%
LiveBench Reasoning—47.8%
LiveBench Data Analysis—45.2%
Epoch Capabilities Index—130.42
LiveBench—41.6%

Math Not comparable

Mercury: —, Phi-4: 20.8 (#285)

Math benchmarks
BenchmarkMercuryPhi-4
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025—13.8%
LiveBench Math—42%
LMArena Math—1246
MATH Level 5—64.9%

Knowledge Not comparable

Mercury: —, Phi-4: 32.6 (#209)

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkMercuryPhi-4
GPQA Diamond—56.1%
Confabulations—29.4%
Vectara Hallucination Rate—3.7%
LMArena Expert—1203
MMLU—84.8%

Multilingual Mercury leads

Mercury: 41.6 (#206), Phi-4: 37.2 (#237)

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkMercuryPhi-4
LMArena Non-English12601197
LMArena Chinese—1212
LMArena French—1224
LMArena German—1222
LMArena Japanese—1158
LMArena Korean—1151
LMArena Russian—1209
LMArena Spanish—1234

Instruction Following Mercury leads

Mercury: 65.2 (#224), Phi-4: 60.4 (#251)

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkMercuryPhi-4
LMArena Instruction Following12391201
LiveBench Instruction Following—58.4%

Long Context Mercury leads

Mercury: 38.4 (#198), Phi-4: 36.9 (#226)

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkMercuryPhi-4
LMArena Longer Query12661217

Writing & Preference Mercury leads

Mercury: 46.2 (#221), Phi-4: 40.5 (#244)

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkMercuryPhi-4
LMArena Text12821217
LMArena Creative Writing11911182
LMArena Multi-Turn12821206
Short-Story Creative Writing—62.6%
LiveBench Language—25.6%

Frequently asked questions

Is Mercury better than Phi-4?

Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 31.2 on the Noometry Index.

Is Mercury or Phi-4 better for coding?

Mercury scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.7 versus 34.4 in the Noometry coding category.

How many benchmarks do Mercury and Phi-4 share?

8 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury has 9 scored results on Noometry and Phi-4 has 37.

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