Mercury 3 vs Qwen3-Coder
Comparing Mercury 3 and Qwen3-Coder across benchmarks, pricing, and capabilities.
Inception · Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Updated for 2026
Which is better?
Mercury 3 and Qwen3-Coder trade strengths across price, capabilities, and technical limits. The better choice depends on the workload.
On price, Mercury 3 is roughly 1.1x cheaper per token on a blended 3:1 input/output basis, which adds up quickly at production volume.
Mercury 3 also accepts a larger context window (1,000,000 input tokens), making it the stronger choice for long documents and large codebases.
Based on current LLM Stats indexes, shared benchmarks, pricing, and model metadata for 2026.
Choose Mercury 3
- cost matters — it's about 1.1x cheaper per token
- you process long inputs — it offers a 1,000,000 token context window
- you want the most recent training data — it shipped Oct 2026
Choose Qwen3-Coder
- you need open weights you can self-host or fine-tune
At a glance
The differences that matter most.
Individual benchmarks
12 reported for Mercury 3 · 0 for Qwen3-Coder
Mercury 3 and Qwen3-Coderdon'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
Pricing Analysis
Price comparison per million tokens
For input processing, Mercury 3 ($0.10/1M tokens) is 1.8x cheaper than Qwen3-Coder ($0.18/1M tokens).
For output processing, Mercury 3 ($0.35/1M tokens) is 1.9x more expensive than Qwen3-Coder ($0.18/1M tokens).
In conclusion, Qwen3-Coder is more expensive than Mercury 3.*
* Using a 3:1 ratio of input to output tokens
Context Window
Maximum input and output token capacity
Mercury 3 accepts 1,000,000 input tokens compared to Qwen3-Coder's 256,000 tokens. Qwen3-Coder can generate longer responses up to 256,000 tokens, while Mercury 3 is limited to 131,072 tokens.
License
Usage and distribution terms
Mercury 3 is licensed under a proprietary license, while Qwen3-Coder uses Apache 2.0.
License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.
Proprietary
Closed source
Apache 2.0
Open weights
Release Timeline
When each model was launched
Mercury 3 was released on 2026-10-19, while Qwen3-Coder was released on 2025-01-01.
Mercury 3 is 22 months newer than Qwen3-Coder.
Oct 19, 2026
0 days ago
1.8yr newerJan 1, 2025
1.8 years ago
Knowledge Cutoff
When training data ends
Neither model specifies a knowledge cutoff date.
Unable to compare the recency of their training data.
Provider Availability
Mercury 3 is available from Inception. Qwen3-Coder is available from DeepInfra, Fireworks.
Mercury 3
Qwen3-Coder
Outputs Comparison
Judge for yourself.
Run your own prompts against Mercury 3 and Qwen3-Coder side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.
FAQ
Common questions about Mercury 3 vs Qwen3-Coder.