Head-to-head comparison
Mercury 2.5 (Inception Labs) and MiniMax-01 (MiniMax) compared on the ModelCap Index, API price, context window, provider availability, weight access and every public benchmark board they share. Figures are the same ones shown on the live rankings; nothing here is a hidden score.
Snapshot as of 22 September 2026
As of 22 September 2026, MiniMax-01 holds the stronger ModelCap Index position (#134 vs #135); Mercury 2.5 is 7.3× cheaper per output token ($0.15/1M vs $1.10/1M); and MiniMax-01 offers the longer context window (1M vs 260K tokens).
Evidence: global-corpus-prior over 208 held-out anchors (21%); opens from measured predecessor inception/mercury-2 (79%); shrunk 4.4 up toward the measured corpus · publisher-corpus-prior over 208 held-out anchors (44%); launch card against 2 resolved peers on 4 rows (56%); optimism haircut 6.45 from cross-lab-probe; shrunk 8.3 up toward the measured corpus. Prices are the lowest listed API offer per million tokens observed on the OpenRouter catalogue.
Neither model has a published result on a public benchmark board ModelCap tracks yet.
Scores are the sources' own published figures for each model's best evaluated configuration; ModelCap never re-runs a benchmark.
Want a different pairing? Open the interactive comparison tool to swap either model for any current ranked language model.
MiniMax-01 ranks higher on the ModelCap Index as of 22 September 2026: #134 against #135. That is a capability ranking built from public benchmark evidence with published uncertainty; whether it is "better" for you also depends on price, context and where you can run it. Their published uncertainty intervals overlap, so the rank difference alone does not establish a reliable capability advantage for your workload.
Mercury 2.5 is cheaper on output tokens: $0.15/1M against $1.10/1M. Input tokens are $0.04/1M for Mercury 2.5 and $0.20/1M for MiniMax-01. Prices are the lowest listed API offer ModelCap observed, in USD per million tokens. For 1,000 requests with 2,000 input and 500 output tokens each (2M input + 0.5M output), the listed-rate estimate is $0.15 for Mercury 2.5 versus $0.95 for MiniMax-01. Mercury 2.5 costs 83.7% less in this scenario. This excludes caching, batch discounts, prompt-length tiers, tool charges and retries; verify the selected endpoint before budgeting.
MiniMax-01 has the larger context window: 1M tokens against 260K.
The two models do not share a coding benchmark board on ModelCap yet, so no head-to-head coding score is published; the ModelCap Index position is the closest overall signal.
Mercury 2.5: API only. MiniMax-01: License unverified. Open weights mean the checkpoint can be downloaded and self-hosted under its licence; API-only models are available solely through hosted endpoints.
ModelCap currently lists 1 API provider for Mercury 2.5 and 1 for MiniMax-01, from the OpenRouter catalogue snapshot the site serves; each model page lists the providers and their prices.
Every figure comes from the sealed ModelCap dataset published 22 September 2026; the page re-renders within a minute of each data refresh, and the ModelCap Index positions are the same ones shown on the live rankings.