Mercury 2 vs Kimi K2.5

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

Mercury 2 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 65 to 60. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Mercury 2's sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 63.7 against 52.3. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is OSWorld-Verified, 62 to 49. Kimi K2.5 does hit back in instruction following, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Kimi K2.5 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $0.50 input / $2.80 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.25 input / $0.75 output per 1M tokens for Mercury 2. That is roughly 3.7x on output cost alone. Mercury 2 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Kimi K2.5 is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use.

Quick Verdict

Pick Mercury 2 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Kimi K2.5 only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Agentic

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

63.7

Kimi K2.5

52.3

63
Terminal-Bench 2.0
51
67
BrowseComp
59
62
OSWorld-Verified
49

Coding

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

41.1

Kimi K2.5

38.9

75
HumanEval
69
46
SWE-bench Verified
42
38
LiveCodeBench
37
43
SWE-bench Pro
40

Multimodal & Grounded

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

68.3

Kimi K2.5

64.6

66
MMMU-Pro
61
71
OfficeQA Pro
69

Reasoning

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

80.1

Kimi K2.5

71.7

82
SimpleQA
74
82
MuSR
72
87
BBH
81
77
LongBench v2
67
76
MRCRv2
70

Knowledge

Tie

Mercury 2

57.2

Kimi K2.5

57.2

78
MMLU
77
78
GPQA
76
76
SuperGPQA
74
74
OpenBookQA
72
72
MMLU-Pro
74
9
HLE
11
69
FrontierScience
67

Instruction Following

Kimi K2.5

Mercury 2

84

Kimi K2.5

85

84
IFEval
85

Multilingual

Kimi K2.5

Mercury 2

79.7

Kimi K2.5

79.8

81
MGSM
83
79
MMLU-ProX
78

Mathematics

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

80.9

Kimi K2.5

78.7

81
AIME 2023
77
83
AIME 2024
79
82
AIME 2025
78
77
HMMT Feb 2023
73
79
HMMT Feb 2024
75
78
HMMT Feb 2025
74
80
BRUMO 2025
76
82
MATH-500
82

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Mercury 2 or Kimi K2.5?

Mercury 2 is ahead overall, 65 to 60. The biggest single separator in this matchup is OSWorld-Verified, where the scores are 62 and 49.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Mercury 2 or Kimi K2.5?

Mercury 2 and Kimi K2.5 are effectively tied for knowledge tasks here, both landing at 57.2 on average.

Which is better for coding, Mercury 2 or Kimi K2.5?

Mercury 2 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 41.1 versus 38.9. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, Mercury 2 or Kimi K2.5?

Mercury 2 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 80.9 versus 78.7. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Mercury 2 or Kimi K2.5?

Mercury 2 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 80.1 versus 71.7. Inside this category, MuSR is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Mercury 2 or Kimi K2.5?

Mercury 2 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 63.7 versus 52.3. Inside this category, OSWorld-Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, Mercury 2 or Kimi K2.5?

Mercury 2 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 68.3 versus 64.6. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Mercury 2 or Kimi K2.5?

Kimi K2.5 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 85 versus 84. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Mercury 2 or Kimi K2.5?

Kimi K2.5 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.8 versus 79.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

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