GLM-5.2 (Max) vs Ministral 3 3B

Which is better for the money: GLM-5.2 (Max) by Z AI or Ministral 3 3B by Mistral? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Trade-off

Z AIGLM-5.2 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 33.70
Total cost: $2097

MistralMinistral 3 3BOn the open-weights frontier

Intelligence: 4.80
Total cost: $12.2

Verdict

Depends on your budget

GLM-5.2 (Max) scores 28.9 points higher (33.7 vs 4.8) but costs 171× as much to run the benchmark ($2097 vs $12.2; flagship vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick GLM-5.2 (Max) when you need intelligence above 4.8, and Ministral 3 3B when 4.8 is enough.

Metric	GLM-5.2 (Max)	Ministral 3 3B	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	33.7	4.8	−85.8% Ministral 3 3B is 85.8% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,097.29	$12.23	−99.4% Ministral 3 3B is 99.4% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	28.14s	3.01s	−89.3% Ministral 3 3B is 89.3% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$1.40 / $4.40	$0.10 / $0.10
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image

Ministral 3 3B vs GLM-5.2 (Max): 85.8% less intelligence, 99.4% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 89.3% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker GLM-5.2 (Max): what beats it Ministral 3 3B: what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

GLM-5.2 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.
Ministral 3 3B is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.

GLM-5.2 (Max)Ministral 3 3BToday'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/glm-5-2/ministral-3-3b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/glm-5-2/ministral-3-3b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill