# Mercury 2.5 vs Qwen Plus

> Qwen Plus is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.1 to 33.5 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2.5 costs 8.9× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen Plus's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mercury-2-5-vs-qwen-plus
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 0

## Summary

- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Qwen Plus leads 28.4 to 22.4.
- Mercury 2.5 is cheaper at $0.04 / $0.15 per million input/output tokens, against $0.40 / $1.20 for Qwen Plus.
- Qwen Plus accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 260K.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 33.5 | 37.1 |
| Rank | 242 | 210 |
| Context | 260K | 1M |
| Input $/M | $0.04 | $0.40 |
| Output $/M | $0.15 | $1.20 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Mercury 2.5: 39.5 (#156)
- Qwen Plus: 38.9 (#167)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen Plus |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 38.5% | — |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1328 |
| ALE-Bench | 301.65 | — |

## Reasoning

- Mercury 2.5: 22.4 (#193)
- Qwen Plus: 28.4 (#107)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 63.3% |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1317 |
| DTBench | — | 81.1% |
| LMCA | — | 24% |

## Math

- Mercury 2.5: 23.3 (#272)
- Qwen Plus: 23.3 (#271)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen Plus |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 17.8% |
| ProofBench | 3% | — |
| LMArena Math | — | 1326 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 65.3% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 1.7% |

## Knowledge

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Qwen Plus: 27.4 (#251)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen Plus |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 48.1% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1328 |

## Multilingual

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Qwen Plus: 45.1 (#175)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen Plus |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1310 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1347 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1251 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1323 |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Qwen Plus: 68.8 (#181)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen Plus |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1303 |

## Long Context

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Qwen Plus: 40.3 (#158)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen Plus |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1324 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury 2.5: —
- Qwen Plus: 52.2 (#176)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen Plus |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1326 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1293 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1336 |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury 2.5 better than Qwen Plus?

Qwen Plus is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.1 to 33.5 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2.5 costs 8.9× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen Plus's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Mercury 2.5 or Qwen Plus?

Mercury 2.5 is cheaper. It lists at $0.04 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens; Qwen Plus lists at $0.40 and $1.20.

### Is Mercury 2.5 or Qwen Plus better for coding?

They score almost the same on coding (39.5 vs 38.9); test both on your own repository before choosing.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Qwen Plus does, with 1M tokens against 260K.

### How many benchmarks do Mercury 2.5 and Qwen Plus share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2.5 has 4 scored results on Noometry and Qwen Plus has 20.