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Codestral-22B vs Mercury 3

Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -0.4.

Mistral AI · Inception · Updated for 2026

Which is better?

Mercury 3 leads the overall LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -0.4, ranking #98 overall.

Based on current LLM Stats indexes, shared benchmarks, pricing, and model metadata for 2026.

Choose Codestral-22B

  • you need open weights you can self-host or fine-tune

Choose Mercury 3

  • overall performance matters — it scores 36.1 and ranks #98 on LLM Stats
  • your work emphasizes reasoning and coding — it leads those capability indexes
  • you want the most recent training data — it shipped Oct 2026

At a glance

The differences that matter most.

Codestral-22B
Mistral AI
Mercury 3
Inception
Core performance indexes
LLM Stats Score
-0.4
#352
36.1
#98
Reasoning
-0.5
#345
34.8
#103
Coding
2.4
#250
21.5
#105
Cost, coverage & limits
Benchmark wins
—
—
Input price
— / M
$0.10 / M
Output price
— / M
$0.35 / M
Context window
—
1,000,000

Individual benchmarks

7 reported for Codestral-22B · 12 for Mercury 3

No common benchmarks found

Codestral-22B and Mercury 3don't have any common benchmark datasets to compare. They may have been evaluated on different testing suites.

Human preference

Blind head-to-head votes and playground preference scores

Context Window

Maximum input and output token capacity

Only Mercury 3 specifies input context (1,000,000 tokens). Only Mercury 3 specifies output context (131,072 tokens).

Mistral AI
Codestral-22B
Input- tokens
Output- tokens
Inception
Mercury 3
Input1,000,000 tokens
Output131,072 tokens
Thu Oct 22 2026 • llm-stats.com

License

Usage and distribution terms

Codestral-22B is licensed under MNPL-0.1, while Mercury 3 uses a proprietary license.

License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.

Codestral-22B

MNPL-0.1

Open weights

Mercury 3

Proprietary

Closed source

Release Timeline

When each model was launched

Codestral-22B was released on 2024-05-29, while Mercury 3 was released on 2026-10-19.

Mercury 3 is 29 months newer than Codestral-22B.

Codestral-22B

May 29, 2024

2.4 years ago

Mercury 3

Oct 19, 2026

0 days ago

2.4yr newer

Knowledge Cutoff

When training data ends

Neither model specifies a knowledge cutoff date.

Unable to compare the recency of their training data.

No cutoff dates available

Outputs Comparison

Notice missing or incorrect data?

Judge for yourself.

Run your own prompts against Codestral-22B and Mercury 3 side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.

Codestral-22B
✓ Preferred
Mercury 3
Open in Playground

FAQ

Common questions about Codestral-22B vs Mercury 3.

Which is better, Codestral-22B or Mercury 3?

Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -0.4. Codestral-22B is made by Mistral AI and Mercury 3 is made by Inception. The best choice depends on your use case — compare their capability indexes, individual benchmarks, pricing, and limits above.

How does Codestral-22B compare to Mercury 3 in benchmarks?

Codestral-22B scores HumanEvalFIM-Average: 91.6%, HumanEval: 81.1%, MBPP: 78.2%, Spider: 63.5%, HumanEval-Average: 61.5%. Mercury 3 scores GPQA: 89.2%, AA-LCR: 77.7%, IFBench: 76.8%, MRCR v2: 75.5%, DeepSearchQA: 71.3%.

What are the context window sizes for Codestral-22B and Mercury 3?

Codestral-22B supports an unknown number of tokens and Mercury 3 supports 1.0M tokens. A larger context window lets you process longer documents, conversations, or codebases in a single request.

What are the main differences between Codestral-22B and Mercury 3?

Key differences include LLM Stats Score (-0.4 vs 36.1), licensing (MNPL-0.1 vs Proprietary). See the full comparison above for benchmark-by-benchmark results.

Who makes Codestral-22B and Mercury 3?

Codestral-22B is developed by Mistral AI and Mercury 3 is developed by Inception.

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