GLM-5.3 (Max) vs Qwen3.8 Max

Which is better for the money: GLM-5.3 (Max) by Z AI or Qwen3.8 Max by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Clear winner

Z AIGLM-5.3 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 44.80
Total cost: $2503

AlibabaQwen3.8 MaxOff the frontier

Intelligence: 40.20
Total cost: $3172

Verdict

Pick GLM-5.3 (Max)

Qwen3.8 Max vs GLM-5.3 (Max): 10.3% less intelligence, 26.7% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 123.4% slower end-to-end.

Metric	GLM-5.3 (Max)	Qwen3.8 Max	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	44.8	40.2	−10.3% Qwen3.8 Max is 10.3% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,503.48	$3,172.37	+26.7% Qwen3.8 Max is 26.7% more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	28.73s	64.17s	+123.4% Qwen3.8 Max is 123.4% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$1.40 / $4.40	$2.00 / $6.00
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image, Video

Open this matchup in the interactive picker GLM-5.3 (Max): what beats it Qwen3.8 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.
Qwen3.8 Max is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 55.10 for $3117.

GLM-5.3 (Max)Qwen3.8 MaxToday'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/qwen3-8-max-0803 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/glm-5-3/qwen3-8-max-0803?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill