GLM-5.3 (Low) vs Qwen3 Coder Next

Which is better for the money: GLM-5.3 (Low) by Z AI or Qwen3 Coder Next by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Trade-off

Z AIGLM-5.3 (Low)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 34.30
Total cost: $1013

AlibabaQwen3 Coder NextOff the frontier

Intelligence: 9.20
Total cost: $405

Verdict

Depends on your budget

GLM-5.3 (Low) scores 25.1 points higher (34.3 vs 9.2) but costs 2.5× as much to run the benchmark ($1013 vs $405; premium vs mid-range cost classes). Pick GLM-5.3 (Low) when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Qwen3 Coder Next.

Metric	GLM-5.3 (Low)	Qwen3 Coder Next	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	34.3	9.2	−73.2% Qwen3 Coder Next is 73.2% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$1,012.50	$405.10	−60.0% Qwen3 Coder Next is 60.0% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	31.17s	6.22s	−80.0% Qwen3 Coder Next is 80.0% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$1.40 / $4.40	$0.31 / $1.00
Input modalities	Text	Text

Qwen3 Coder Next vs GLM-5.3 (Low): 73.2% less intelligence, 60.0% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 80.0% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker GLM-5.3 (Low): what beats it Qwen3 Coder Next: what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

GLM-5.3 (Low) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Xhigh) scores 51.00 for $662.
Qwen3 Coder Next is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Medium) scores 47.80 for $361.

GLM-5.3 (Low)Qwen3 Coder NextToday'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-5-3-low/qwen3-coder-next · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/glm-5-3-low/qwen3-coder-next?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill