Sonar Reasoning Pro Paid vs INMercury 2.5 Paid
Sonar Reasoning Pro vs Mercury 2.5 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Full 2026 breakdown.
Sonar Reasoning Pro — 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.
$8 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
$0.15 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
Sonar Reasoning Pro vs Mercury 2.5 specs
| Spec | Sonar Reasoning Pro | Mercury 2.5 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | Perplexity | Inception | – |
| Type | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 260K tokens | INMercury 2.5 |
| Input price | $2/M | $0.04/M | INMercury 2.5 |
| Output price | $8/M | $0.15/M | INMercury 2.5 |
| Vision / multimodal | Yes | No | |
| Tool / function calling | No | Yes | INMercury 2.5 |
| Self-hostable | No (API only) | No (API only) | – |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
Price gap & when to choose each
Mercury 2.5 is ~53× cheaper than Sonar Reasoning Pro on output tokens ($0.15 vs $8 per M tokens).
- You want frontier performance through a managed API
- You value reliability & ecosystem
- You don't want to manage infrastructure
- 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
| Capability | Sonar Reasoning Pro | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights (downloadable) | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✗ | ✗ |
| Runs fully offline | ✗ | ✗ |
| Vision / multimodal | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tool / function calling | ✗ | ✓ |
| 1M+ context window | ✗ | ✗ |
Benchmarks: Sonar Reasoning Pro vs Mercury 2.5
Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).
Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.
How Sonar Reasoning Pro and Mercury 2.5 score
| Criterion | Sonar Reasoning Pro | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-efficiency | 3.5 | 5.0 |
| Context window | 3.5 | 4.0 |
| 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.
What each model is
Sonar Reasoning Pro Paid
Note: Sonar Pro pricing includes Perplexity search pricing. See [details here](https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/pricing#detailed-pricing-breakdown-for-sonar-reasoning-pro-and-sonar-pro) Sonar Reasoning Pro is a premier reasoning model powe
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...
Frequently asked questions
Sonar Reasoning Pro vs Mercury 2.5 — which is cheaper?
Mercury 2.5 is cheaper on output ($0.15/M vs $8/M).
Which has the larger context window?
Mercury 2.5 offers the larger context window (260K tokens).
Sonar Reasoning Pro vs Mercury 2.5 — which should I pick in 2026?
Choose Mercury 2.5 for the lower output price ($0.15/M vs $8/M). It also gives you the larger 260K context window.
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