AI Models · Paid vs Paid

GPT-4o Paid vs INMercury 2.5 Paid

GPT-4o vs Mercury 2.5 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Full 2026 breakdown.

Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai

Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.

GPT-4oPaidOpenAI
$2.5 /M input
$10 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
TypeProprietary
Context window128K tokens
MultimodalYes
Self-hostNo
INMercury 2.5PaidInception
$0.04 /M input
$0.15 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
TypeProprietary
Context window260K tokens
MultimodalNo
Self-hostNo
Choose Mercury 2.5 for the lower output price ($0.15/M vs $10/M). It also gives you the larger 260K context window.

GPT-4o vs Mercury 2.5 specs

SpecGPT-4oMercury 2.5Winner
MakerOpenAIInception
TypeProprietaryProprietary
Context window128K tokens260K tokensINMercury 2.5
Input price$2.5/M$0.04/MINMercury 2.5
Output price$10/M$0.15/MINMercury 2.5
Vision / multimodalYesNoGPT-4o
Tool / function callingYesYes= Tie
Self-hostableNo (API only)No (API only)
LicenseProprietaryProprietary

Price gap & when to choose each

67×cheaper per output token

Mercury 2.5 is ~67× cheaper than GPT-4o on output tokens ($0.15 vs $10 per M tokens).

Choose GPT-4o if…
  • You want frontier performance through a managed API
  • You value reliability & ecosystem
  • You don't want to manage infrastructure
INChoose Mercury 2.5 if…
  • You want frontier performance through a managed API
  • You need the longer 260K context window
  • You want the lower output price
  • You value reliability & ecosystem
  • You don't want to manage infrastructure

Feature comparison

CapabilityGPT-4oMercury 2.5
Open weights (downloadable)
Self-hostable
Runs fully offline
Vision / multimodal
Tool / function calling
1M+ context window

Benchmarks: GPT-4o vs Mercury 2.5

Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).

GPT-4o
Mercury 2.5
Intelligence index
9
Math index
25.7
GPQA
65.5%
MMLU-Pro
80.3%
Humanity's Last Exam
4%
LiveCodeBench
42.5%
MATH-500
89.3%
AIME
32.7%
AIME 2025
25.7%
Speed
0 tok/s
Latency
0s

Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.

How GPT-4o and Mercury 2.5 score

🤝 Neck and neck on these criteria (2.9 vs 3.0 / 5).
CriterionGPT-4oMercury 2.5
Cost-efficiency3.55.0
Context window3.54.0
Openness1.51.5
Self-hosting1.01.0
Multimodality5.03.5

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

GPT-4o Paid

OpenAI · Proprietary

GPT-4o ("o" for "omni") is OpenAI's latest AI model, supporting both text and image inputs with text outputs. It maintains the intelligence level of [GPT-4 Turbo](/models/openai/gpt-4-turbo) while being twice as...

Mercury 2.5 Paid

Inception · Proprietary

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...

Frequently asked questions

GPT-4o vs Mercury 2.5 — which is cheaper?

Mercury 2.5 is cheaper on output ($0.15/M vs $10/M).

Which has the larger context window?

Mercury 2.5 offers the larger context window (260K tokens).

GPT-4o vs Mercury 2.5 — which should I pick in 2026?

Choose Mercury 2.5 for the lower output price ($0.15/M vs $10/M). It also gives you the larger 260K context window.

People also compare

Explore more open-source AI

Browse the full open-source model leaderboard, thousands of tools and live benchmarks — all in one place.

Open the leaderboard →