# Mercury 2 vs Mistral Medium 3.5

> Mistral Medium 3.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.2 to 39.1 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 8.0× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Medium 3.5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mercury-2-vs-mistral-medium-3-5
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 12

## Summary

- They share 12 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2 scores higher in 1 category and Mistral Medium 3.5 in 6 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Mercury 2 leads 23.8 to 17.3.
- Mercury 2 is cheaper at $0.25 / $0.75 per million input/output tokens, against $1.50 / $7.50 for Mistral Medium 3.5.
- Mistral Medium 3.5 accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 128K.
- Mistral Medium 3.5 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury 2 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 39.1 | 40.2 |
| Rank | 175 | 152 |
| Context | 128K | 262K |
| Input $/M | $0.25 | $1.50 |
| Output $/M | $0.75 | $7.50 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Mercury 2: 33.5 (#255)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 36.0 (#213)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena WebDev | 1171 | 1264 |
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | 1461 |
| SciCode | 38.7% | — |
| WeirdML | 43.2% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 785.58 | — |

## Reasoning

- Mercury 2: 23.8 (#170)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 17.3 (#295)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1362 | 1436 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 41.4% |
| NYT Connections (extended) | — | 12.9% |
| CritPt | 0.8% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 141.35 |

## Math

- Mercury 2: —
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 39.1 (#113)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | — | 1431 |

## Knowledge

- Mercury 2: 36.2 (#172)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 40.0 (#126)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | 1432 |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.3% | — |

## Multimodal

- Mercury 2: —
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 38.3 (#65)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1223 |

## Multilingual

- Mercury 2: 46.6 (#157)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 51.9 (#100)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1331 | 1404 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1417 | 1442 |
| LMArena Russian | 1304 | 1395 |
| LMArena French | — | 1448 |
| LMArena German | — | 1451 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1385 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1409 |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury 2: 70.2 (#165)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 74.6 (#90)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1329 | 1415 |

## Long Context

- Mercury 2: 40.5 (#154)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 43.2 (#103)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1330 | 1415 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury 2: 53.8 (#155)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 58.5 (#117)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1355 | 1421 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1289 | 1374 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1358 | 1423 |
| EQ-Bench 4 | — | 993 |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury 2 better than Mistral Medium 3.5?

Mistral Medium 3.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.2 to 39.1 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 8.0× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Mistral Medium 3.5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Mistral Medium 3.5?

Mercury 2 is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens; Mistral Medium 3.5 lists at $1.50 and $7.50.

### Is Mercury 2 or Mistral Medium 3.5 better for coding?

Mistral Medium 3.5 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 36.0 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Mistral Medium 3.5 does, with 262K tokens against 128K.

### How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Mistral Medium 3.5 share?

12 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Medium 3.5 has 22.