inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash VL vs Z.ai: GLM 5.3 Flash
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash VL | Z.ai: GLM 5.3 Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | inclusionai | z-ai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Input Price | $0.06/M | $0.03/M |
| Output Price | $0.18/M | $0.08/M |
| Context Window | 131,072 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 32,768 | 131,072 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, GLM 5.3 Flash costs $0.054 and Ling 3.0 Flash VL costs $0.10, so GLM 5.3 Flash is about 1.9 times cheaper for the same work.
GLM 5.3 Flash reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 197 pages for Ling 3.0 Flash VL.
Across the 15 tasks where they differ, GLM 5.3 Flash on 15 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Ling 3.0 Flash VL was released in September 2026 and GLM 5.3 Flash in August 2026.
Pick GLM 5.3 Flash if you need lower cost, long documents or the stronger all-round task scores.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash VL | Z.ai: GLM 5.3 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 128 | 134 |
| Code Review | 121 | 132 |
| Code Completion | 126 | 132 |
| Code Refactoring | 119 | 136 |
| Bug Fixing | 125 | 136 |
| Unit Test Generation | 118 | 124 |
| Code Documentation | 121 | 132 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 114 | 120 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 123 | 134 |
| ETL Scripting | 117 | 128 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 130 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 125 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 125 | 131 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 121 | 138 |
| Blog Post Writing | 116 | 122 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →