GLM-5.3 (Max) vs GPT-5.6 Sol (Max)

Which is better for the money: GLM-5.3 (Max) by Z AI or GPT-5.6 Sol (Max) by OpenAI? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Trade-off

Z AIGLM-5.3 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 44.80
Total cost: $2503

OpenAIGPT-5.6 Sol (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 47.00
Total cost: $3465

Verdict

Depends on your budget

GPT-5.6 Sol (Max) scores 2.2 points higher (47.0 vs 44.8) but costs 1.4× as much to run the benchmark ($3465 vs $2503; both flagship class). Pick GPT-5.6 Sol (Max) when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise GLM-5.3 (Max).

Metric	GLM-5.3 (Max)	GPT-5.6 Sol (Max)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	44.8	47.0	+4.9% GPT-5.6 Sol (Max) is 4.9% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,503.48	$3,464.84	+38.4% GPT-5.6 Sol (Max) is 38.4% more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	28.79s	92.19s	+220.2% GPT-5.6 Sol (Max) is 220.2% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$1.40 / $4.40	$4.00 / $20.0
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image

GPT-5.6 Sol (Max) vs GLM-5.3 (Max): 4.9% more intelligence, 38.4% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 220.2% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker GLM-5.3 (Max): what beats it GPT-5.6 Sol (Max): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

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.
GPT-5.6 Sol (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 55.10 for $3117.

GLM-5.3 (Max)GPT-5.6 Sol (Max)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-5-3/gpt-5-6-sol · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/glm-5-3/gpt-5-6-sol?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill