LLM Compare
Head to head

Beam 1.0 vs Mercury 3

How Beam 1.0 and Mercury 3 stack up across benchmarks, pricing, speed, and the workloads that matter.

Beam 1.0

Reflection AI · Open weights

Blended price$0.49per 1M tokens
Context1.05Mtokens
Speedn/atok/s
Benchmarks22results
VS

Mercury 3

Inception · Proprietary

Blended price$0.13per 1M tokens
Context1Mtokens
Speed1068tok/s
Benchmarks12results

Beam 1.0 costs $0.49 per million blended tokens, about 3.83x the price of Mercury 3. On agents & tool use, Beam 1.0 leads by about 20 points in our normalized benchmark average.

The table below breaks down every workload axis where both models have published results. Each score is a normalized 0 to 1 average across the benchmarks tagged with that category. A gap of a few points is noise; a gap of ten or more is a real difference in capability. Where one model has not reported a result, the cell shows n/a and the missing benchmark does not drag its average down.

Benchmark scores by workload

WorkloadBeam 1.0Mercury 3Edge
Reasoning 54% 67% +12.8 pts
Coding 67% 49% +17.9 pts
Agents & tool use 59% 40% +19.5 pts
Math 50% n/a n/a
Vision & multimodal 44% n/a n/a
Long context 73% 77% +3.7 pts
Knowledge & factuality 56% 65% +9.2 pts

The headline benchmarks below are the most widely cited individual tests. GPQA Diamond measures graduate-level reasoning in physics, chemistry, and biology. SWE-Bench Verified tests whether a model can fix real GitHub issues. MMMU-Pro covers college-level multimodal understanding across six disciplines. AIME and FrontierMath push competitive and research math. BrowseComp measures web research ability.

Headline benchmarks

BenchmarkBeam 1.0Mercury 3
GPQA 91% 89%
SWE-Bench Verified 82% n/a
LiveCodeBench 88% n/a
BrowseComp 77% n/a

Benchmarks tell you what a model can do in a controlled setting. They do not tell you whether it will work on your specific task, with your specific data, at your specific scale. The recommendations below map each common workload to whichever of these two models scores higher on the relevant axis. Use them as a starting point, not a final answer.

Which should you choose?

Hard reasoning

Multi-step analysis, research, and problems that need sustained thought.

Mercury 3

Coding & software

Writing, reviewing, and debugging code across a real codebase.

Beam 1.0

Agents & tool use

Long-running agents that call tools, browse, and act on their own.

Beam 1.0

Math & science

Formal math, competitive problems, and quantitative science.

Beam 1.0

Vision & documents

Reading images, screenshots, charts, and dense documents.

Beam 1.0

Long documents

Whole codebases, books, and transcripts that fill the context window.

Mercury 3

High-volume & cost-sensitive

Cheap, repetitive calls where the blended token price dominates.

Mercury 3

Scores are normalized from public benchmarks published by llm-stats.com and averaged per workload. Pricing is the blended input/output cost per million tokens at an 8:1 mix. Refreshes daily. How this works.