# Mercury 2 vs Qwen3 Max

> Qwen3 Max is the stronger model overall, scoring 43.7 to 39.1 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 6.4× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3 Max's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mercury-2-vs-qwen3-max
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 12

## Summary

- They share 12 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2 scores higher in 1 category and Qwen3 Max in 6 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where Qwen3 Max leads 48.1 to 36.2.
- Mercury 2 is cheaper at $0.25 / $0.75 per million input/output tokens, against $1.20 / $6 for Qwen3 Max.
- Qwen3 Max accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 128K.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury 2 | Qwen3 Max |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 39.1 | 43.7 |
| Rank | 175 | 87 |
| Context | 128K | 262K |
| Input $/M | $0.25 | $1.20 |
| Output $/M | $0.75 | $6 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Mercury 2: 33.5 (#255)
- Qwen3 Max: 43.0 (#93)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3 Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | 1456 |
| ALE-Bench | 785.58 | 370.45 |
| LMArena WebDev | 1171 | — |
| SciCode | 38.7% | — |
| WeirdML | 43.2% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mercury 2: —
- Qwen3 Max: —

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3 Max |
|---|---|---|
| Vending-Bench 2 | — | 71.56 |

## Reasoning

- Mercury 2: 23.8 (#170)
- Qwen3 Max: 22.6 (#190)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3 Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1362 | 1448 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 72.5% |
| NYT Connections (extended) | — | 30.1% |
| CritPt | 0.8% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 4% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 5% |
| DTBench | — | 82.1% |
| LMCA | — | 28.3% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 142.38 |

## Math

- Mercury 2: —
- Qwen3 Max: 38.7 (#131)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3 Max |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 18.9% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 73.3% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1446 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 97.1% |

## Knowledge

- Mercury 2: 36.2 (#172)
- Qwen3 Max: 48.1 (#78)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3 Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1358 | 1455 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 72.6% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 48.7% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.3% | — |

## Multilingual

- Mercury 2: 46.6 (#157)
- Qwen3 Max: 53.7 (#62)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3 Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1331 | 1429 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1417 | 1478 |
| LMArena Russian | 1304 | 1428 |
| LMArena French | — | 1449 |
| LMArena German | — | 1463 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1397 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1399 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1462 |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury 2: 70.2 (#165)
- Qwen3 Max: 74.8 (#87)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3 Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1329 | 1419 |

## Long Context

- Mercury 2: 40.5 (#154)
- Qwen3 Max: 41.6 (#134)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3 Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1330 | 1438 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 66.7% |
| CL-bench | — | 14.5% |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury 2: 53.8 (#155)
- Qwen3 Max: 62.4 (#76)

| Benchmark | Mercury 2 | Qwen3 Max |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1355 | 1439 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1289 | 1402 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1358 | 1446 |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury 2 better than Qwen3 Max?

Qwen3 Max is the stronger model overall, scoring 43.7 to 39.1 on the Noometry Index. Mercury 2 costs 6.4× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3 Max's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or Qwen3 Max?

Mercury 2 is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens; Qwen3 Max lists at $1.20 and $6.

### Is Mercury 2 or Qwen3 Max better for coding?

Qwen3 Max scores higher on coding benchmarks: 43.0 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Qwen3 Max does, with 262K tokens against 128K.

### How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and Qwen3 Max share?

12 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3 Max has 33.