Claude Opus 5 Paid vs INMercury 2.5 Paid
Claude Opus 5 vs Mercury 2.5 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Full 2026 breakdown.
Claude Opus 5 — full profile › · Mercury 2.5 — full profile ›
Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai
Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.
$25 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
$0.15 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
Claude Opus 5 vs Mercury 2.5 specs
| Spec | Claude Opus 5 | Mercury 2.5 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | Anthropic | Inception | – |
| Type | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 260K tokens | |
| Input price | $5/M | $0.04/M | INMercury 2.5 |
| Output price | $25/M | $0.15/M | INMercury 2.5 |
| Vision / multimodal | Yes | No | |
| Tool / function calling | Yes | Yes | = Tie |
| Self-hostable | No (API only) | No (API only) | – |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
Price gap & when to choose each
Mercury 2.5 is ~167× cheaper than Claude Opus 5 on output tokens ($0.15 vs $25 per M tokens).
- You want frontier performance through a managed API
- You need the longer 1M context window
- You value reliability & ecosystem
- You don't want to manage infrastructure
- You want frontier performance through a managed API
- You want the lower output price
- You value reliability & ecosystem
- You don't want to manage infrastructure
Feature comparison
| Capability | Claude Opus 5 | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights (downloadable) | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✗ | ✗ |
| Runs fully offline | ✗ | ✗ |
| Vision / multimodal | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tool / function calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| 1M+ context window | ✓ | ✗ |
Benchmarks: Claude Opus 5 vs Mercury 2.5
Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).
Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.
How Claude Opus 5 and Mercury 2.5 score
| Criterion | Claude Opus 5 | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-efficiency | 3.0 | 5.0 |
| Context window | 5.0 | 4.0 |
| Openness | 1.5 | 1.5 |
| Self-hosting | 1.0 | 1.0 |
| Multimodality | 5.0 | 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.
What each model is
Claude Opus 5 Paid
Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic’s flagship model for demanding reasoning, coding, and long-horizon agentic work. It is particularly strong at end-to-end software tasks, code review and bug finding, visual analysis...
Mercury 2.5 Paid
Mercury 2.5 is the fastest reasoning LLM, and the latest diffusion LLM (dLLM) from Inception. Instead of generating tokens sequentially, Mercury 2.5 produces and refines multiple tokens in parallel, achieving...
Other models in these families
These variants are tracked but not compared here — one page per family keeps the comparison readable.
Frequently asked questions
Claude Opus 5 vs Mercury 2.5 — which is cheaper?
Mercury 2.5 is cheaper on output ($0.15/M vs $25/M).
Which has the larger context window?
Claude Opus 5 offers the larger context window (1M tokens).
Claude Opus 5 vs Mercury 2.5 — which should I pick in 2026?
Choose Mercury 2.5 for the lower output price ($0.15/M vs $25/M). Choose Claude Opus 5 if you need the larger 1M context window.
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