How much does the GLM-5 API cost?

GLM-5 costs $1 per million input tokens and $3.2 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.2 per million. A workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month costs about $14.80.

What is the context window of GLM-5?

GLM-5 supports a context window of 200,000 tokens (200K), with up to 128K output tokens per response.

Is GLM-5 open source?

Yes — GLM-5 is an open-weights model released under the MIT license, so it can be downloaded and self-hosted.

What are the best alternatives to GLM-5?

The closest alternatives by overall capability are Qwen3-Max, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro. See the comparison pages for detailed head-to-head breakdowns.

GLM-5

Name: GLM-5
Price: 1 USD
Author: Z.ai (Zhipu)

Z.ai (Zhipu)·Feb 2026reasoningopen weights · MIT

GLM-5 is Z.ai's (formerly Zhipu AI) open-weights flagship: a 744B-parameter mixture-of-experts that lands within roughly four points of Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-bench Verified while costing $1/$3.20 per million tokens on the official API — and nothing at all if you host the MIT-licensed weights yourself. Part of the early-2026 wave of Chinese open releases pressing the closed frontier, it continues the GLM line's tradition of being the budget coding-agent engine of choice. The GLM-5.1 refresh (April 2026) pushed the line to #1 among open models on SWE-bench Pro.

Benchmark results

SWE-bench VerifiedCoding · #13 of 33~77.8%

Where it shines

Near-Opus agentic coding from MIT-licensed weights
Thinking modes, context caching and 128K output
Aggressive API and subscription pricing

Alternatives to GLM-5

Qwen3-Max

Alibaba's trillion-parameter API flagship — frontier-adjacent quality with strong agentic tool use at mid-tier prices.

GPT-5.5

OpenAI's flagship reasoning model with a 1M-token context window, built for hard coding, science and long-horizon agentic work.

Gemini 3 Pro

Google's November 2025 frontier breakout — 91.9% GPQA Diamond and 37.5% HLE made it the reasoning leader of its generation.

Gemini 2.5 Pro

Google's 2025 workhorse flagship — first mainstream thinking model with a 1M context, still widely deployed.

Frequently asked questions

How much does the GLM-5 API cost?: GLM-5 costs $1 per million input tokens and $3.2 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.2 per million. A workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month costs about $14.80.
What is the context window of GLM-5?: GLM-5 supports a context window of 200,000 tokens (200K), with up to 128K output tokens per response.
Is GLM-5 open source?: Yes — GLM-5 is an open-weights model released under the MIT license, so it can be downloaded and self-hosted.
What are the best alternatives to GLM-5?: The closest alternatives by overall capability are Qwen3-Max, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro. See the comparison pages for detailed head-to-head breakdowns.