LLM Compare
Head to head

Mercury 3 vs Claude Haiku 5.5

How Mercury 3 and Claude Haiku 5.5 stack up across benchmarks, pricing, speed, and the workloads that matter.

Mercury 3

Inception · Proprietary

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

Claude Haiku 5.5

Anthropic · Proprietary

Blended price$0.14per 1M tokens
Context1Mtokens
Speedn/atok/s
Benchmarks36results

Mercury 3 is the cheaper of the two at $0.13 per million blended tokens, about 1.13x less than Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.14. On reasoning, Mercury 3 leads by about 11 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

WorkloadMercury 3Claude Haiku 5.5Edge
Reasoning 67% 56% +10.8 pts
Coding 49% 57% +8 pts
Agents & tool use 40% 42% +1.8 pts
Math n/a 52% n/a
Vision & multimodal n/a 55% n/a
Long context 77% n/a n/a
Writing n/a 53% n/a
Knowledge & factuality 65% 62% +3 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

BenchmarkMercury 3Claude Haiku 5.5
GPQA 89% 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.

Claude Haiku 5.5

Agents & tool use

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

Claude Haiku 5.5

Math & science

Formal math, competitive problems, and quantitative science.

Claude Haiku 5.5

Vision & documents

Reading images, screenshots, charts, and dense documents.

Claude Haiku 5.5

Long documents

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

Mercury 3

Writing & drafting

Copy, emails, and long-form drafting where tone matters.

Claude Haiku 5.5

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.