Mercury 2 alternatives
Match · Updated July 2026
The closest alternative to Mercury 2 is Qwen3.5-9B — comparable intelligence (21.4 vs 21.4); for a cheaper option, MiniMax M3 (batch) runs $0.150/M vs $0.250/M; and the best open-weight substitute is Kimi K3.
Closest match
Cheaper alternatives
minimax-m3:batch
$0.150/M input · 44.4 intel
hy3
$0.132/M input · 41.2 intel
deepseek-v4-flash
$0.140/M input · 40.3 intel
gpt-5.4-nano
$0.200/M input · 38.2 intel
gpt-5.4-nano:batch
$0.100/M input · 38.2 intel
mimo-v2.5
$0.140/M input · 37.2 intel
Smarter alternatives
Open-source alternatives
kimi-k3
57.1 intel · open weights · 1.0M ctx
glm-5.2
51.1 intel · open weights · 1.0M ctx
minimax-m3
44.4 intel · open weights · 1.0M ctx
minimax-m3:batch
44.4 intel · open weights · 524K ctx
deepseek-v4-pro
44.3 intel · open weights · 1.0M ctx
kimi-k2.6
44.2 intel · open weights · 262K ctx
Frequently asked
What is the best alternative to Mercury 2?
Qwen3.5-9B is the closest alternative to Mercury 2, with an Intelligence Index of 21.4 (Mercury 2 scores 21.4) at $0.100 per million input tokens.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Mercury 2?
Yes — MiniMax M3 (batch) costs $0.150 per million input tokens versus $0.250 for Mercury 2, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
Is there an open-source alternative to Mercury 2?
Kimi K3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Mercury 2 — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 57.1 on intelligence.