Mercury 3 vs Qwen3.5-2B
Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to 3.3.
Inception · Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Updated for 2026
Which is better?
Mercury 3 leads the overall LLM Stats Score 36.1 to 3.3, ranking #98 overall.
In the 4 individual benchmarks reported for both models, Mercury 3 wins 4; this is a narrower head-to-head signal than the composite indexes.
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 agents — it leads those capability indexes
- you value its reported benchmark strengths — it wins 4 of 4 exact shared results
- you want the most recent training data — it shipped Oct 2026
Choose Qwen3.5-2B
- you need open weights you can self-host or fine-tune
At a glance
The differences that matter most.
Capability indexes
Additional strengths measured across groups of related public benchmarks
Individual benchmarks
12 reported for Mercury 3 · 20 for Qwen3.5-2B
Mercury 3 outperforms in 4 benchmarks (AA-LCR, GPQA, IFBench, Multi-Challenge), while Qwen3.5-2B is better at 0 benchmarks.
Mercury 3 significantly outperforms across most benchmarks.
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).
Input capabilities
Documented input modalities across available providers
Qwen3.5-2B supports multimodal inputs, whereas Mercury 3 does not.
Qwen3.5-2B can handle both text and other forms of data like images, making it suitable for multimodal applications.
Mercury 3
Qwen3.5-2B
License
Usage and distribution terms
Mercury 3 is licensed under a proprietary license, while Qwen3.5-2B 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 Qwen3.5-2B was released on 2026-03-02.
Mercury 3 is 8 months newer than Qwen3.5-2B.
Oct 19, 2026
1 days ago
7mo newerMar 2, 2026
7 months ago
Knowledge Cutoff
When training data ends
Neither model specifies a knowledge cutoff date.
Unable to compare the recency of their training data.
Outputs Comparison
Judge for yourself.
Run your own prompts against Mercury 3 and Qwen3.5-2B side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.
FAQ
Common questions about Mercury 3 vs Qwen3.5-2B.