Mercury 2 vs Qwen3 Coder Next
Which is better for the money: Mercury 2 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
Qwen3 Coder Next vs Mercury 2: 14.8% less intelligence, 286.0% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 6.5% faster end-to-end.
| Metric | Mercury 2 | Qwen3 Coder Next | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 10.8 | 9.2 | −14.8% Qwen3 Coder Next is 14.8% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $104.94 | $405.10 | +286.0% Qwen3 Coder Next is 3.9× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 6.65s | 6.22s | −6.5% Qwen3 Coder Next is 6.5% faster |
| 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 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (High) scores 37.80 for $94.1.
- Qwen3 Coder Next is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Medium) scores 47.80 for $361.
Mercury 2Qwen3 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/qwen3-coder-next · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/mercury-2/qwen3-coder-next?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill