Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) vs GLM-5.3 (Max)

Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or GLM-5.3 (Max) by Z AI? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Clear winner

AnthropicClaude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 51.20
Total cost: $1627

Z AIGLM-5.3 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 44.80
Total cost: $2503

Verdict

Pick Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)

GLM-5.3 (Max) vs Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): 12.5% less intelligence, 53.9% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 39.2% slower end-to-end.

Metric	Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)	GLM-5.3 (Max)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	51.2	44.8	−12.5% GLM-5.3 (Max) is 12.5% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$1,626.81	$2,503.48	+53.9% GLM-5.3 (Max) is 53.9% more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	20.68s	28.79s	+39.2% GLM-5.3 (Max) is 39.2% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$4.00 / $20.0	$1.40 / $4.40
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): what beats it GLM-5.3 (Max): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.
GLM-5.3 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) scores 53.60 for $2172.

Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)GLM-5.3 (Max)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

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Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5-medium/glm-5-3 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5-medium/glm-5-3?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill