Aion-3.0 vs Mercury 2 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Full 2026 breakdown.
Aion-3.0 — full profile › · Mercury 2 — full profile ›
Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai
Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.
| Spec | Aion-3.0 | Mercury 2 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | AionLabs | Inception | – |
| Type | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
| Context window | 131K tokens | 128K tokens | AIAion-3.0 |
| Input price | $3/M | $0.25/M | INMercury 2 |
| Output price | $6/M | $0.75/M | INMercury 2 |
| Vision / multimodal | No | No | – |
| Tool / function calling | Yes | Yes | = Tie |
| Self-hostable | No (API only) | No (API only) | – |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
Mercury 2 is ~8.0× cheaper than Aion-3.0 on output tokens ($0.75 vs $6 per M tokens).
| Capability | Aion-3.0 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights (downloadable) | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✗ | ✗ |
| Runs fully offline | ✗ | ✗ |
| Vision / multimodal | ✗ | ✗ |
| Tool / function calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| 1M+ context window | ✗ | ✗ |
Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).
Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.
| Criterion | Aion-3.0 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-efficiency | 4.0 | 5.0 |
| Context window | 3.5 | 3.5 |
| Openness | 1.5 | 1.5 |
| Self-hosting | 1.0 | 1.0 |
| Multimodality | 3.5 | 3.5 |
Scores come from live data — output price (cost), context length, open vs closed weights (openness & self-hosting) and vision/tool support (multimodality). Raw task quality isn't scored here; it depends on your benchmark — see the verdict.
Aion-3.0 is a multi-model roleplaying and storytelling system from AionLabs, built on the GLM family of models. It uses a collaborative generation process in which multiple specialized models each contribute...
Mercury 2 is an extremely fast reasoning LLM, and the first reasoning diffusion LLM (dLLM). Instead of generating tokens sequentially, Mercury 2 produces and refines multiple tokens in parallel, achieving...
Mercury 2 is cheaper on output ($0.75/M vs $6/M).
Aion-3.0 offers the larger context window (131K tokens).
Choose Mercury 2 for the lower output price ($0.75/M vs $6/M). Choose Aion-3.0 if you need the larger 131K context window.
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