# Mercury 2.5 vs o1

> o1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.9 to 33.5 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2.5 costs 389× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mercury-2-5-vs-o1
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 0

## Summary

- The widest gap is in math, where o1 leads 36.1 to 23.3.
- Mercury 2.5 is cheaper at $0.04 / $0.15 per million input/output tokens, against $15 / $60 for o1.
- Mercury 2.5 accepts more context: 260K tokens versus 200K.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury 2.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 33.5 | 40.9 |
| Rank | 242 | 143 |
| Context | 260K | 200K |
| Input $/M | $0.04 | $15 |
| Output $/M | $0.15 | $60 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Mercury 2.5: 39.5 (#156)
- o1: 46.1 (#70)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | — | 61.7% |
| SciCode | 38.5% | — |
| WeirdML | — | 47.6% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 69.7% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1367 |
| CadEval | — | 56% |
| ALE-Bench | 301.65 | — |
| HumanEval+ | — | 89% |
| MBPP+ | — | 80.2% |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mercury 2.5: —
- o1: 24.6 (#117)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| Cybench | — | 10% |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 51.1% |

## Reasoning

- Mercury 2.5: 22.4 (#193)
- o1: 27.9 (#111)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| SimpleBench | — | 41.7% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 30.7% |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 15% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 5.7% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 91.6% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1371 |
| DTBench | — | 74.7% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 65.5% |
| LMCA | — | 22.3% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 141.91 |
| LiveBench | — | 75.7% |

## Math

- Mercury 2.5: 23.3 (#272)
- o1: 36.1 (#175)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 14.7% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 73.3% |
| ProofBench | 3% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 80.3% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1388 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 94.7% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 9.3% |

## Knowledge

- Mercury 2.5: —
- o1: 41.5 (#110)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 76.8% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 8% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 41.1% |
| Confabulations | — | 11.7% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1361 |

## Multimodal

- Mercury 2.5: —
- o1: 34.2 (#93)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1168 |
| GeoBench | — | 80% |
| VPCT | — | 37% |
| SpatialViz-Bench | — | 41.4% |

## Multilingual

- Mercury 2.5: —
- o1: 48.6 (#142)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1358 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1394 |
| LMArena French | — | 1344 |
| LMArena German | — | 1337 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1346 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1396 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1356 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1345 |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury 2.5: —
- o1: 74.8 (#86)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 81.5% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1367 |

## Long Context

- Mercury 2.5: —
- o1: 50.3 (#9)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 83.3% |
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1378 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury 2.5: —
- o1: 55.6 (#144)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1366 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1348 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 70.2% |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1369 |
| LiveBench Language | — | 65.4% |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury 2.5 better than o1?

o1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.9 to 33.5 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2.5 costs 389× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Mercury 2.5 or o1?

Mercury 2.5 is cheaper. It lists at $0.04 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens; o1 lists at $15 and $60.

### Is Mercury 2.5 or o1 better for coding?

o1 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 46.1 versus 39.5 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mercury 2.5 does, with 260K tokens against 200K.

### How many benchmarks do Mercury 2.5 and o1 share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2.5 has 4 scored results on Noometry and o1 has 52.