Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Mercury 2 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 65 to 59. 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 reasoning, where it averages 80.1 against 69.6. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MuSR, 82 to 68. MiniMax M2.5 does hit back in multilingual, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
MiniMax M2.5 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $0.30 input / $1.20 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.25 input / $0.75 output per 1M tokens for Mercury 2. Mercury 2 is the reasoning model in the pair, while MiniMax M2.5 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.
Pick Mercury 2 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. MiniMax M2.5 only becomes the better choice if multilingual is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Mercury 2
63.7
MiniMax M2.5
53.4
Mercury 2
41.1
MiniMax M2.5
38.7
Mercury 2
68.3
MiniMax M2.5
62
Mercury 2
80.1
MiniMax M2.5
69.6
Mercury 2
57.2
MiniMax M2.5
55.3
Mercury 2
84
MiniMax M2.5
85
Mercury 2
79.7
MiniMax M2.5
82.1
Mercury 2
80.9
MiniMax M2.5
76.1
Mercury 2 is ahead overall, 65 to 59. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MuSR, where the scores are 82 and 68.
Mercury 2 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 57.2 versus 55.3. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 41.1 versus 38.7. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 80.9 versus 76.1. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 80.1 versus 69.6. Inside this category, MuSR is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 63.7 versus 53.4. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 68.3 versus 62. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
MiniMax M2.5 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.
MiniMax M2.5 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 82.1 versus 79.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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