GLM-5.3 wins on price ($1.4 vs $2/1M input). Qwen 3.8 Max wins on coding (93 vs 91) and writing quality. For most workflows, GLM-5.3 is the stronger default — same price as glm-5.2, far stronger on agents and security.
The shortest way to see the safest default, the lower-cost option, and the specialist pick before you read deeper.
GLM-5.3 is the safest overall answer here when you want the strongest default instead of the lowest list price.
Mistral: Mistral Nemo is the lower-cost option to start with when you still need useful output at scale.
Qwen 3.8 Max is the better pick when response speed matters more than maximum reasoning depth.
Qwen 3.8 Max leads on coding with a score of 93 vs 91 for GLM-5.3.
GLM-5.3 is cheaper at $1.4/1M input tokens vs $2/1M for Qwen 3.8 Max.
GLM-5.3 is the stronger default for coding tasks.
GLM-5.3 is the safer default: it is built for agentic engineering and security work on open weights, which covers most of what people bring to this comparison.
Qwen 3.8 Max earns its place when your work is mostly multimodal and vision-heavy workloads at scale, even though it loses the overall count here.
Both models serve different primary workflows — GLM-5.3 for agentic engineering and security work on open weights, Qwen 3.8 Max for multimodal and vision-heavy workloads at scale — so running each where it has a clear edge often beats forcing one to do both.
Switch the scoring lens to see whether the top answer changes when you care more about cost, speed, or long-document work.
Alibaba / Balanced / Aug 6, 2026
Best Chinese flagship — beats GPT-5.6 Sol on coding, #2 globally for vision.
Ranks models by the broadest mix of coding, writing, research, and long-context usefulness.
You need independently verified benchmarks or Western data residency.
The fastest way to see where the recommendation shifts when your priority changes.
Same price as GLM-5.2, far stronger on agents and security.
Best Chinese flagship — beats GPT-5.6 Sol on coding, #2 globally for vision.
Every figure below is the provider's list price or a published capability score — the same numbers the recommendation on this page is built from.
| Model | Input | Output | Est. month | Context | Speed | Coding | Writing | Research |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLM-5.3Z.ai | $1.40/1M | $4.40/1M | $23 | 1M tokens | Balanced | 91 | 79 | 82 |
| Qwen 3.8 MaxAlibaba | $2.00/1M | $6.00/1M | $32 | 1M tokens | Balanced | 93 | 85 | 88 |
Capability scores are out of 100 and reflect our own weighting of published benchmarks and production signals — see how we evaluate models. “Est. month” assumes 10M input and 2M output tokens at list price, with no batch or caching discounts applied, so treat it as a ceiling.
What each one is genuinely good at, where it falls down, and the situations we would steer you away from it — not just the headline score.
Z.ai's newest flagship, aimed squarely at software engineering, autonomous agents and cybersecurity — and the first open-weights model to beat Claude Mythos 5 on a security benchmark.
Your procurement process requires a SWE-bench Verified figure, or you need the closed-frontier reasoning ceiling.
The clear upgrade over GLM-5.2 at the same price — take it unless you specifically need a published SWE-bench Verified number to sign off on. The security benchmark lead over Mythos 5 is the genuinely new thing here.
Released August 14, 2026. Z.ai list pricing is $1.40/$4.40, the same rate as GLM-5.2; resellers discount from that list. Also available through the GLM Coding Plan from $18/mo. Reported GPQA Diamond 91.7% and Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index 59.5.
Alibaba's largest model ever — a 2.4-trillion-parameter MoE (95B active) multimodal flagship that beat GPT-5.6 Sol on SWE-bench Pro and ranks #2 globally for vision.
You need independently verified benchmarks or Western data residency.
The strongest Chinese multimodal flagship and a legitimate SWE-bench Pro upset over GPT-5.6 Sol. If vision matters, only Fable 5-class models beat it — at 3–8x the price. Wait for independent evals before betting production on the self-reported numbers.
Announced August 3, 2026 on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio; open weights promised a week after launch. $2/$6 is first-party Model Studio pricing; cache reads from $0.17/1M. Announcement moved Alibaba stock +7% in Hong Kong.
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GLM-5.3 wins on more of the categories we score — coding, reasoning, budget — so it is the better default of the two. Qwen 3.8 Max is the better pick when your work is mostly multimodal and vision-heavy workloads at scale. Neither is universally "better": GLM-5.3 is aimed at agentic engineering and security work on open weights, Qwen 3.8 Max at multimodal and vision-heavy workloads at scale.
GLM-5.3 is cheaper at $1.4/1M input and $4.4/1M output. Qwen 3.8 Max costs $2/1M input and $6/1M output.
Both GLM-5.3 and Qwen 3.8 Max have the same 1M context window.
Qwen 3.8 Max is better for coding with a score of 93 vs GLM-5.3's 91 (out of 100). Claude Fable 5 is the overall coding leader in this directory at 100/100.
Both GLM-5.3 and Qwen 3.8 Max have similar speed profiles — rated balanced. Neither will be the bottleneck if latency is your deciding factor.
No published SWE-bench Verified score, so it is absent from the benchmark most buyers compare on. Priced identically to GLM-5.2 at $1.40/$4.40 — the upgrade is capability, not value. Avoid it if your procurement process requires a SWE-bench Verified figure, or you need the closed-frontier reasoning ceiling. That is the main case for looking at Qwen 3.8 Max instead.
Well behind Claude Fable 5 on SWE-bench Pro (67.7 vs 80.0) and behind several Anthropic models on text rankings. No independent third-party benchmarks at GA — early claims are largely Alibaba-reported. Avoid it if you need independently verified benchmarks or Western data residency. Against GLM-5.3 specifically, the gap shows up most on coding (91 vs 93).
Take a moderate workload of 10M input and 2M output tokens a month. GLM-5.3 runs $22.80 (at $1.4/1M in and $4.4/1M out); Qwen 3.8 Max runs $32.00 (at $2/1M in and $6/1M out). That is a $9.20/month difference — GLM-5.3 is the cheaper of the two at this volume, and the gap scales linearly as you send more. Output tokens dominate the bill on both, so prompt length matters far less than response length.
Yes, and for most teams that beats picking one. A common split is GLM-5.3 for agentic engineering and security work on open weights, with Qwen 3.8 Max handling multimodal and vision-heavy workloads at scale. Since GLM-5.3 is both the stronger and the cheaper option here, a split mainly makes sense if Qwen 3.8 Max covers a capability you specifically need.