Mercury 3 vs Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct
Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to 20.6. Mercury 3 is 2.9x cheaper per token.
Inception · Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Updated for 2026
Which is better?
Mercury 3 leads the overall LLM Stats Score 36.1 to 20.6, ranking #98 overall.
On price, Mercury 3 is roughly 2.9x 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
- overall performance matters — it scores 36.1 and ranks #98 on LLM Stats
- your work emphasizes reasoning and coding — it leads those capability indexes
- cost matters — it's about 2.9x 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 480B A35B Instruct
- 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 · 10 for Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct
Mercury 3 and Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instructdon'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 3.0x cheaper than Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct ($0.30/1M tokens).
For output processing, Mercury 3 ($0.35/1M tokens) is 2.9x cheaper than Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct ($1.00/1M tokens).
In conclusion, Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct 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 480B A35B Instruct's 262,144 tokens. Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct can generate longer responses up to 262,144 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 480B A35B Instruct 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 480B A35B Instruct was released on 2025-01-31.
Mercury 3 is 21 months newer than Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct.
Oct 19, 2026
1 days ago
1.7yr newerJan 31, 2025
1.7 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 480B A35B Instruct is available from DeepInfra.
Mercury 3
Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct
Outputs Comparison
Judge for yourself.
Run your own prompts against Mercury 3 and Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.
FAQ
Common questions about Mercury 3 vs Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct.
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