Mercury 2.5 vs Qwen3 Coder Next
Which is better for the money: Mercury 2.5 by Inception or Qwen3 Coder Next by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Mercury 2.5
Qwen3 Coder Next vs Mercury 2.5: 25.2% less intelligence, 85.7% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 44.0% slower end-to-end.
| Metric | Mercury 2.5 | Qwen3 Coder Next | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 12.3 | 9.2 | −25.2% Qwen3 Coder Next is 25.2% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $218.11 | $405.10 | +85.7% Qwen3 Coder Next is 85.7% more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 4.32s | 6.22s | +44.0% Qwen3 Coder Next is 44.0% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.25 / $0.75 | $0.31 / $1.00 | |
| Input modalities | Text | Text |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Mercury 2.5 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 46.30 for $207.
- Qwen3 Coder Next is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Medium) scores 47.80 for $361.
Mercury 2.5Qwen3 Coder NextToday's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model
Matchup
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Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/mercury-2-5/qwen3-coder-next · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/mercury-2-5/qwen3-coder-next?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill