# Gemma 3 12B vs Mercury 2.5

> Gemma 3 12B has enough public results to be ranked (#255); Mercury 2.5 does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/gemma-3-12b-vs-mercury-2-5
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 0

## Summary

- Mercury 2.5 is cheaper at $0.04 / $0.15 per million input/output tokens, against $0.05 / $0.15 for Gemma 3 12B.
- Mercury 2.5 accepts more context: 260K tokens versus 131K.
- Gemma 3 12B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google | Inception |
| Noometry Index | 31.8 | 30.2 |
| Rank | 255 | — |
| Context | 131K | 260K |
| Input $/M | $0.05 | $0.04 |
| Output $/M | $0.15 | $0.15 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Gemma 3 12B: 31.2 (#276)
- Mercury 2.5: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 17.4% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1281 | — |
| ALE-Bench | — | 301.65 |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Gemma 3 12B: 25.3 (#101)
- Mercury 2.5: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 30.4% | — |

## Reasoning

- Gemma 3 12B: 15.2 (#307)
- Mercury 2.5: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1309 | — |
| DTBench | 48.8% | — |
| LMCA | 4.5% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 123.49 | — |

## Math

- Gemma 3 12B: 21.0 (#273)
- Mercury 2.5: 22.4

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 16.7% | — |
| ProofBench | — | 3% |
| LMArena Math | 1307 | — |

## Knowledge

- Gemma 3 12B: 26.5 (#250)
- Mercury 2.5: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 39.5% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 4.4% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1248 | — |

## Multimodal

- Gemma 3 12B: —
- Mercury 2.5: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| MindCube | 46.7% | — |

## Multilingual

- Gemma 3 12B: 45.9 (#160)
- Mercury 2.5: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1318 | — |
| LMArena German | 1370 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1335 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Gemma 3 12B: 68.8 (#179)
- Mercury 2.5: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1299 | — |

## Long Context

- Gemma 3 12B: 40.0 (#157)
- Mercury 2.5: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1317 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Gemma 3 12B: 47.7 (#205)
- Mercury 2.5: —

| Benchmark | Gemma 3 12B | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1334 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1331 | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1126 | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1334 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Gemma 3 12B better than Mercury 2.5?

Gemma 3 12B has enough public results to be ranked (#255); Mercury 2.5 does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

### Which is cheaper, Gemma 3 12B or Mercury 2.5?

Mercury 2.5 is cheaper. It lists at $0.04 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens; Gemma 3 12B lists at $0.05 and $0.15.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mercury 2.5 does, with 260K tokens against 131K.

### How many benchmarks do Gemma 3 12B and Mercury 2.5 share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Gemma 3 12B has 24 scored results on Noometry and Mercury 2.5 has 2.