Claude Sonnet 5 Paid vs INMercury 2 Paid
Claude Sonnet 5 vs Mercury 2 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Full 2026 breakdown.
Claude Sonnet 5 — 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.
$10 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
$0.75 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
Claude Sonnet 5 vs Mercury 2 specs
| Spec | Claude Sonnet 5 | Mercury 2 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | Anthropic | Inception | – |
| Type | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 128K tokens | |
| Input price | $2/M | $0.25/M | INMercury 2 |
| Output price | $10/M | $0.75/M | INMercury 2 |
| 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 is ~13× cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5 on output tokens ($0.75 vs $10 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 Sonnet 5 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights (downloadable) | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✗ | ✗ |
| Runs fully offline | ✗ | ✗ |
| Vision / multimodal | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tool / function calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| 1M+ context window | ✓ | ✗ |
Benchmarks: Claude Sonnet 5 vs Mercury 2
Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).
Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.
How Claude Sonnet 5 and Mercury 2 score
| Criterion | Claude Sonnet 5 | Mercury 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-efficiency | 3.5 | 5.0 |
| Context window | 5.0 | 3.5 |
| 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 Sonnet 5 Paid
Sonnet 5 is Anthropic's most capable Sonnet-class model, with frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work. It supports adaptive thinking with selectable reasoning effort levels (low, medium, high, max,...
Mercury 2 Paid
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...
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 Sonnet 5 vs Mercury 2 — which is cheaper?
Mercury 2 is cheaper on output ($0.75/M vs $10/M).
Which has the larger context window?
Claude Sonnet 5 offers the larger context window (1M tokens).
Claude Sonnet 5 vs Mercury 2 — which should I pick in 2026?
Choose Mercury 2 for the lower output price ($0.75/M vs $10/M). Choose Claude Sonnet 5 if you need the larger 1M context window.
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