Qwen: Qwen3.8 Flash vs Z.ai: GLM 5.3 Flash
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-11.
| Qwen: Qwen3.8 Flash | Z.ai: GLM 5.3 Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | z-ai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 70.6 |
| Input Price | $0.15/M | $0.15/M |
| Output Price | $0.47/M | $0.50/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 131,072 | 943,717 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 69.0 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.8 Flash costs $0.27 and GLM 5.3 Flash costs $0.28, so Qwen3.8 Flash is slightly cheaper for the same work.
Both take in a similar amount of text: 1,000,000 and 1,048,576 tokens, about 1,500 and 1,573 pages.
Across the 18 tasks where they differ, GLM 5.3 Flash on 18 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Pick Qwen3.8 Flash if you need lower cost; pick GLM 5.3 Flash if you need 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 | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Flash | Z.ai: GLM 5.3 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 133 | 142 |
| Code Review | 132 | 145 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 133 |
| Code Refactoring | 136 | 147 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 149 |
| Unit Test Generation | 124 | 132 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 138 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 126 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 128 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 130 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 134 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 136 |
| ETL Scripting | 128 | 137 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 131 | 134 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 131 | 134 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 149 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 127 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 130 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →