# Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite vs Mercury 2

> Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 38.8 to 36.4 on the Noometry Index. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite costs 2.1× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mercury 2's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/gemini-2-5-flash-lite-vs-mercury-2
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 14

## Summary

- They share 14 benchmarks with published results for both. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite scores higher in 3 categories and Mercury 2 in 4 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in long context, where Mercury 2 leads 40.4 to 33.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Vectara Hallucination Rate: 3.3% for Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite and 12.3% for Mercury 2.
- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is cheaper at $0.10 / $0.40 per million input/output tokens, against $0.25 / $0.75 for Mercury 2.
- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite accepts more context: 1.05M tokens versus 128K.

## Snapshot

| | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google | Inception |
| Noometry Index | 36.4 | 38.8 |
| Rank | 208 | 167 |
| Context | 1.05M | 128K |
| Input $/M | $0.10 | $0.25 |
| Output $/M | $0.40 | $0.75 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 38.0 (#167)
- Mercury 2: 33.2 (#250)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| WeirdML | 35.2% | 43.2% |
| LMArena Coding | 1373 | 1391 |
| ALE-Bench | 325.9 | 785.58 |
| LMArena WebDev | — | 1170 |
| SciCode | — | 38.7% |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 27.8 (#89)
- Mercury 2: —

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 36.9% | — |

## Reasoning

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 21.5 (#196)
- Mercury 2: 23.0 (#170)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1377 | 1362 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 40.5% | — |
| CritPt | — | 0.8% |
| DTBench | 62.8% | — |
| LMCA | 18.1% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 133.93 | — |

## Math

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 35.5 (#144)
- Mercury 2: —

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Omni-MATH | 48% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1373 | — |

## Knowledge

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 32.1 (#206)
- Mercury 2: 35.6 (#170)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 3.3% | 12.3% |
| LMArena Expert | 1373 | 1358 |
| MMLU-Pro | 53.7% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 30.9% | — |

## Multimodal

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 28.6 (#109)
- Mercury 2: —

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1198 | — |
| VPCT | 30% | — |

## Multilingual

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 49.5 (#129)
- Mercury 2: 46.8 (#153)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1369 | 1331 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1404 | 1416 |
| LMArena Russian | 1373 | 1303 |
| LMArena French | 1388 | — |
| LMArena German | 1390 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1359 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1358 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1396 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 70.2 (#163)
- Mercury 2: 70.4 (#161)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1366 | 1328 |
| IFEval | 81% | — |

## Long Context

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 33.3 (#257)
- Mercury 2: 40.4 (#149)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1373 | 1329 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | 47.2% | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite: 57.0 (#130)
- Mercury 2: 54.0 (#151)

| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1379 | 1355 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1366 | 1289 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1367 | 1358 |
| WildBench | 81.8% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite better than Mercury 2?

Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 38.8 to 36.4 on the Noometry Index. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite costs 2.1× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mercury 2's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite or Mercury 2?

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is cheaper. It lists at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.40 per million output tokens; Mercury 2 lists at $0.25 and $0.75.

### Is Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite or Mercury 2 better for coding?

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.0 versus 33.2 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite does, with 1.05M tokens against 128K.

### How many benchmarks do Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite and Mercury 2 share?

14 benchmarks have published results for both models. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite has 33 scored results on Noometry and Mercury 2 has 17.