GLM-5.1 (Reasoning) vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: GLM-5.1 (Reasoning) by Z AI or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) by NVIDIA? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

Z AIGLM-5.1 (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 26.10
Total cost: $1212

NVIDIANVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 8.90
Total cost: $63.7

Verdict

Depends on your budget

GLM-5.1 (Reasoning) scores 17.2 points higher (26.1 vs 8.9) but costs 19× as much to run the benchmark ($1212 vs $63.7; premium vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick GLM-5.1 (Reasoning) when you need intelligence above 8.9, and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoni… when 8.9 is enough.

Metric	GLM-5.1 (Reasoning)	NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	26.1	8.9	−65.9% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 65.9% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$1,211.83	$63.74	−94.7% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 94.7% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	58.41s	10.10s	−82.7% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 82.7% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$1.28 / $4.07	$0.05 / $0.20
Input modalities	Text	Text

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) vs GLM-5.1 (Reasoning): 65.9% less intelligence, 94.7% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 82.7% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker GLM-5.1 (Reasoning): what beats it NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

GLM-5.1 (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) scores 34.50 for $56.4.

GLM-5.1 (Reasoning)NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/glm-5-1/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/glm-5-1/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill