Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Mercury 2 has the cleaner overall profile here, landing at 65 versus 63. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.
Mercury 2's sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 63.7 against 58.5. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is OSWorld-Verified, 62 to 55. o4-mini (high) does hit back in knowledge, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Mercury 2 is the reasoning model in the pair, while o4-mini (high) 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. o4-mini (high) gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for Mercury 2.
Pick Mercury 2 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. o4-mini (high) only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority or you need the larger 200K context window.
Mercury 2
63.7
o4-mini (high)
58.5
Mercury 2
41.1
o4-mini (high)
38.7
Mercury 2
68.3
o4-mini (high)
68.3
Mercury 2
80.1
o4-mini (high)
77.4
Mercury 2
57.2
o4-mini (high)
61.2
Mercury 2
84
o4-mini (high)
83
Mercury 2
79.7
o4-mini (high)
81.7
Mercury 2
80.9
o4-mini (high)
82.9
Mercury 2 is ahead overall, 65 to 63. The biggest single separator in this matchup is OSWorld-Verified, where the scores are 62 and 55.
o4-mini (high) has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 61.2 versus 57.2. Inside this category, MMLU 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, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
o4-mini (high) has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 82.9 versus 80.9. 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 77.4. 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 58.5. Inside this category, OSWorld-Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 and o4-mini (high) are effectively tied for multimodal and grounded tasks here, both landing at 68.3 on average.
Mercury 2 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 84 versus 83. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
o4-mini (high) has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 81.7 versus 79.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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