Claude Haiku 5.5 vs Mercury 2.5
Claude Haiku 5.5 leads Mercury 2.5 on coding, 70.7 to 1.6 on the Vibe Coding Index, and Mercury 2.5 costs 3.3x less per output token ($0.15 vs $0.50 per million). Updated October 22, 2026; 18 benchmarks have a result for both.
Claude Haiku 5.5 or Mercury 2.5: which to pick
Pick Claude Haiku 5.5 for coding: it scores 70.7 on the Vibe Coding Index against 1.6 for Mercury 2.5.
Pick Mercury 2.5 for output tokens 3.3x cheaper ($0.15 vs $0.50 per million).
- Shared results
- 18
- Claude Haiku 5.5 only
- 45
- Mercury 2.5 only
- 4
- Like-for-like categories
- 7 of 9
Only benchmarks that tested both models count toward a pick; a result only one model has is shown but not compared.
Which one for your work
Each card is decided by one number both models carry. Where only one has it, the card says so and makes no call.
Coding
Vibe Coding Index, six public coding benchmarks
Claude Haiku 5.5
Claude Haiku 5.5 scores 70.7 against 1.6.
5 and 2 benchmarks behind the scores
Intelligence
AA Intelligence Index
Claude Haiku 5.5
Claude Haiku 5.5 leads, 43.4 against 12.3.
Same board, both measured
Web design
Design Arena: websites
No call
Only Claude Haiku 5.5 has a Design Arena: websites result, 1262.
Directional only
General
Vals Index
No call
Only Claude Haiku 5.5 has a Vals Index result, 58.7%.
Directional only
Long documents
Listed context window
Claude Haiku 5.5
Claude Haiku 5.5 takes 1M tokens against 260K.
Listed by OpenRouter
Everyday cost
1K input + 500 output tokens
Mercury 2.5
Claude Haiku 5.5 $0.0003, Mercury 2.5 $0.0001 per turn.
List prices
At a glance
- Coding index
- Claude Haiku 5.5 70.7 from 5 benchmarks, Mercury 2.5 1.6 from 2 benchmarks.
- Widest category
- Math, 86.0 points apart on average over 1 shared benchmark.
- Widest single gap
- Vibe Code Bench (Vals AI): Claude Haiku 5.5 90.4% against Mercury 2.5 3.7%, 86.8 points apart on a 0 to 100 scale.
- Output price
- Claude Haiku 5.5 $0.50 against Mercury 2.5 $0.15 per million output tokens, 3.3x apart.
- Context window
- Claude Haiku 5.5 takes 1M tokens, Mercury 2.5 260K.
Benchmark by benchmark
First the score: boards each model leads, per category, where both have a result. Then every board, a category to a fold; bars are each result on a 0 to 100 scale, so compare the two in a row, not one row with another.
| Category | Claude Haiku 5.5 | Bars | Mercury 2.5 | Ties |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coding | 6 | 0 | ||
| Intelligence | 1 | 0 | ||
| Agentic work | 5 | 0 | ||
| Reasoning | 1 | 0 | ||
| Math | 1 | 0 | ||
| Knowledge | 1 | 0 | ||
| General | 3 | 0 | ||
| All shared boards | 18 | 0 |
CodingLike-for-likeSix of these boards feed the Vibe Coding Index60
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 5.5 | Mercury 2.5 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| LiveBench coding | 91.4% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| LMArena WebDev | 1586 | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Terminal-Bench 4 (Vals AI) | 36.4% | 0.0% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| Vibe Code Bench (Vals AI) | 90.4% | 3.7% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| Code migration (Vals AI) | 44.6% | 4.5% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| ProgramBench (Vals AI) | 2.5% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| IOI (Vals AI) | 47.3% | 2.4% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals AI) | Not measured | 34.5% | Only Mercury 2.5 measured |
| SWE-bench Multimodal (Vals AI) | 44.0% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Vibe Code Bench 1-100 (Vals AI) | 20.4% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| SkillsBench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 18.1% | Only Mercury 2.5 measured |
| CyberBench (Vals AI) | 75.5% | 45.5% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| SciCode | 55.0% | 38.5% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| FrontierCode | 46.4% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| FrontierSWE | 43.8% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| ALE-Bench | Not measured | 301.6 | Only Mercury 2.5 measured |
| LMArena WebDev: React | 1605 | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| LMArena WebDev: HTML | 1569 | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| SciCode | 9.2% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 20 boards here | |||
IntelligenceLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index10
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 5.5 | Mercury 2.5 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| AA Intelligence Index | 43.4 | 12.3 | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 159.3 | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
Agentic workLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index50
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 5.5 | Mercury 2.5 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| LiveBench research | 81.9% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| LiveBench browser | 80.0% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| LiveBench long agentic | 57.6% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| SREBench (Vals AI) | 5.7% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Finance Agent (Vals AI) | 54.1% | 18.9% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| Tax Agent Bench (Vals AI) | 31.9% | 2.5% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| Legal Research Bench (Vals AI) | 43.3% | 4.3% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark (Vals AI) | 4.2% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Excel Modeling Benchmark (Vals AI) | 59.0% | 8.8% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| BioMysteryBench (Vals AI) | 70.4% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Terminal-Bench-Science (Vals AI) | 10.0% | 0.0% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| Vals Science Index | 38.5% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| APEX-Agents | 56.1% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Vending-Bench 2 | $3,602 | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 27 boards here | |||
ReasoningLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index10
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 5.5 | Mercury 2.5 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| LiveBench reasoning | 82.4% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| MysteryMechanism (Vals AI) | 35.1% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Humanity's Last Exam (Artificial Analysis run) | 44.4% | 11.8% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| GPQA Diamond (Epoch AI run) | 89.6% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| ARC-AGI | 89.0% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 61.3% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Chess puzzles | 55.0% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Mystery game puzzles | 30.0% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| EBR-bench | 43.8% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 13 boards here | |||
MathLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index10
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 5.5 | Mercury 2.5 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME | 98.9% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| FrontierMath, tiers 1 to 3 | 75.1% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| FrontierMath, tier 4 | 46.3% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| ProofBench | 89.0% | 3.0% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| Neither model has a result on the other 9 boards here | |||
KnowledgeLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index10
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 5.5 | Mercury 2.5 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| LegalBench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 83.1% | Only Mercury 2.5 measured |
| MedCode (Vals AI) | 51.5% | 31.3% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| SimpleQA Verified | 23.8% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 15 boards here | |||
Web designDirectional onlyPublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index7 boards, none shared
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 5.5 | Mercury 2.5 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design Arena: websites | 1262 | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Design Arena: UI components | 1291 | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Design Arena: game dev | 1313 | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Design Arena: data viz | 1294 | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Design Arena: 3D | 1342 | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Design Arena: all code categories | 1278 | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| LiveBench design | 83.1% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 2 boards here | |||
GeneralLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index30
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 5.5 | Mercury 2.5 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vals Index | 58.7% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| LiveBench data analysis | 53.1% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Public Benefits Bench (Vals AI) | 63.2% | 45.3% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| SAGE (Vals AI) | 45.8% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| MedScribe (Vals AI) | 89.5% | 55.1% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| Long context reasoning (AA-LCR) | 82.7% | 71.7% | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| DTBench | 95.0% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| LMCA | 51.1% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Furniture assembly | 47.5% | Not measured | Only Claude Haiku 5.5 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 37 boards here | |||
Image generationNot comparablePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index0 boards, none shared
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 5.5 | Mercury 2.5 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neither model has a result on 5 boards here | |||
What each workload costs
Three fixed token mixes at each model's listed price, so per-token rates become a bill.
Chat turn
1K input + 500 output tokens
Mercury 2.5 costs less
Repository review
50K input + 3K output tokens
Mercury 2.5 costs less
Agent loop
200K input + 10K output tokens
Mercury 2.5 costs less
Listed OpenRouter rates, without cache or batch discounts. A workload that does not fit a model's context window would need splitting.
Specification differences
The leading value in a row is marked; a row with a missing value names no leader. Our two rows are marked in red.
| Specification | Anthropic Claude Haiku 5.5 | Inception Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Anthropic | Inception |
| Weights | No public weights listed | No public weights listed |
| Released | October 7, 2026 | September 8, 2026 |
| Context window | 1M | 260K |
| Input $/Mtok | $0.10 | $0.04 |
| Output $/Mtok | $0.50 | $0.15 |
| Coding index | 70.7 | 1.6 |
| Independent measurements behind it | 5 | 2 |
| Cost per solved task | Not computable | Not computable |
| Source | OpenRouter listing | OpenRouter listing |
Questions
Is Claude Haiku 5.5 better than Mercury 2.5 for coding?
Pick Claude Haiku 5.5 for coding: it scores 70.7 on the Vibe Coding Index against 1.6 for Mercury 2.5. Pick Mercury 2.5 for output tokens 3.3x cheaper ($0.15 vs $0.50 per million).
Which is cheaper, Claude Haiku 5.5 or Mercury 2.5?
Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens; Mercury 2.5 costs $0.04 and $0.15. Cost per solved task is known for neither of them.
Which has the bigger context window, Claude Haiku 5.5 or Mercury 2.5?
Claude Haiku 5.5, with 1M tokens against 260K.
How many benchmarks is the Claude Haiku 5.5 vs Mercury 2.5 comparison based on?
18 benchmarks have a result for both models as of October 22, 2026. Claude Haiku 5.5's coding index rests on 5 independent benchmarks and Mercury 2.5's on 2. Where only one model has a result, the page says so instead of naming a winner.