# Mercury vs Yi-Lightning

> Mercury and Yi-Lightning score almost the same on the Noometry Index (37.3 vs 36.5), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

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

## Summary

- They share 8 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury scores higher in 1 category and Yi-Lightning in 5 categories; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where Mercury leads 38.1 to 27.0.

## Snapshot

| | Mercury | Yi-Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | 01.AI |
| Noometry Index | 37.3 | 36.5 |
| Rank | 192 | 206 |
| Context | — | — |
| Input $/M | — | — |
| Output $/M | — | — |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Mercury: 38.1 (#164)
- Yi-Lightning: 27.0 (#315)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Yi-Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1323 | 1313 |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 12.9% |

## Reasoning

- Mercury: 16.8 (#288)
- Yi-Lightning: 24.9 (#137)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Yi-Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1284 | 1302 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 21.6% | — |

## Math

- Mercury: —
- Yi-Lightning: 33.5 (#173)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Yi-Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | — | 1300 |

## Knowledge

- Mercury: —
- Yi-Lightning: 34.8 (#182)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Yi-Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | — | 1286 |

## Multilingual

- Mercury: 41.7 (#201)
- Yi-Lightning: 42.4 (#191)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Yi-Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1259 | 1269 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1320 |
| LMArena French | — | 1304 |
| LMArena German | — | 1267 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1228 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1192 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1255 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1315 |

## Instruction Following

- Mercury: 65.3 (#220)
- Yi-Lightning: 67.6 (#191)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Yi-Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1238 | 1278 |

## Long Context

- Mercury: 38.3 (#193)
- Yi-Lightning: 39.4 (#176)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Yi-Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1264 | 1297 |

## Writing & Preference

- Mercury: 46.2 (#216)
- Yi-Lightning: 50.4 (#178)

| Benchmark | Mercury | Yi-Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1282 | 1302 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1186 | 1280 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1283 | 1311 |

## FAQ

### Is Mercury better than Yi-Lightning?

Mercury and Yi-Lightning score almost the same on the Noometry Index (37.3 vs 36.5), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Is Mercury or Yi-Lightning better for coding?

Mercury scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.1 versus 27.0 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Mercury and Yi-Lightning share?

8 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury has 9 scored results on Noometry and Yi-Lightning has 18.