# Mercury vs Ministral 8B

> Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.3 to 27.8 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/mercury-vs-ministral-8b
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 8

## Summary

- They share 8 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury scores higher in 5 categories and Ministral 8B in 1 category; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mercury leads 46.2 to 39.8.
- Ministral 8B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 37.3 | 27.8 |
| Rank | 192 | 321 |
| Context | — | 128K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.10 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.10 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Mercury: 38.1 (#164)
- Ministral 8B: 34.4 (#226)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1323 | 1202 |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Mercury: —
- Ministral 8B: 16.2 (#140)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 11.1% |

## Reasoning

- Mercury: 16.8 (#288)
- Ministral 8B: 17.7 (#279)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1284 | 1191 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 21.6% | — |
| DTBench | — | 45.7% |

## Math

- Mercury: —
- Ministral 8B: 23.7 (#262)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | — | 1188 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 14.9% |

## Knowledge

- Mercury: —
- Ministral 8B: 12.5 (#292)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 27.1% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 7.4% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1170 |

## Multilingual

- Mercury: 41.7 (#201)
- Ministral 8B: 35.3 (#242)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1259 | 1165 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1193 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1195 |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury: 65.3 (#220)
- Ministral 8B: 60.7 (#245)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1238 | 1161 |

## Long Context

- Mercury: 38.3 (#193)
- Ministral 8B: 36.7 (#222)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1264 | 1212 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury: 46.2 (#216)
- Ministral 8B: 39.8 (#241)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Ministral 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1282 | 1191 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1186 | 1175 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1283 | 1166 |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury better than Ministral 8B?

Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.3 to 27.8 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Mercury or Ministral 8B better for coding?

Mercury scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.1 versus 34.4 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Mercury and Ministral 8B share?

8 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury has 9 scored results on Noometry and Ministral 8B has 17.