GLM-5 vs Qwen3-235B-A22B
Benchmarks, API pricing and specs, head to head. Data updated 2026-06-10.
Z.ai (Zhipu) · Feb 2026
Z.ai's 744B open-weights MoE — within ~4 points of Opus 4.6 on SWE-bench Verified at $1/$3.20 per million tokens.
Alibaba (Qwen) · Jul 2025
The most popular open general-purpose Qwen: 235B MoE with hybrid thinking, a staple of the 2025 open-source ecosystem.
The verdict
These two models don't yet share verified results on the benchmarks we track, so judge them on specs, pricing and intended use. On price the gap is dramatic: Qwen3-235B-A22B works out roughly 4.0x cheaper per blended million tokens. Qwen3-235B-A22B also takes 262K of context versus 200K for GLM-5.
Specs & pricing
| GLM-5 | Qwen3-235B-A22B | |
|---|---|---|
| modhub Index | — | 69.0 |
| Input price / 1M | $1 | $0.22 |
| Output price / 1M | $3.2 | $0.88 |
| Context window | 200K | 262K |
| Max output | 128K | 33K |
| Open weights | yes (MIT) | yes (Apache 2.0) |
| Reasoning model | yes | yes |
| Multimodal input | text | text |
| Knowledge cutoff | Dec 2025 | Apr 2025 |
| Released | Feb 2026 | Jul 2025 |
| Example monthly cost* | $14.80 | $3.52 |
* 10M input + 1.5M output tokens per month at list prices, no caching. Green = better value on that row.
Frequently asked questions
- Which is better, GLM-5 or Qwen3-235B-A22B?
- These two models don't yet share verified results on the benchmarks we track, so judge them on specs, pricing and intended use. On price the gap is dramatic: Qwen3-235B-A22B works out roughly 4.0x cheaper per blended million tokens. Qwen3-235B-A22B also takes 262K of context versus 200K for GLM-5.
- Which is cheaper, GLM-5 or Qwen3-235B-A22B?
- GLM-5 costs $1/$3.2 per million input/output tokens, while Qwen3-235B-A22B costs $0.22/$0.88. For a typical workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month, that's $14.80 versus $3.52.
- Which model is better for coding, GLM-5 or Qwen3-235B-A22B?
- We don't yet track SWE-bench Verified results for both models; check their individual pages for coding-related scores.