GLM-5.3 (Max) vs Qwen3 Coder Next

Which is better for the money: GLM-5.3 (Max) 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 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 44.80
Total cost: $2503

AlibabaQwen3 Coder NextOff the frontier

Intelligence: 9.20
Total cost: $405

Verdict

Depends on your budget

GLM-5.3 (Max) scores 35.6 points higher (44.8 vs 9.2) but costs 6.2× as much to run the benchmark ($2503 vs $405; flagship vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick GLM-5.3 (Max) when you need intelligence above 9.2, and Qwen3 Coder Next when 9.2 is enough.

Metric	GLM-5.3 (Max)	Qwen3 Coder Next	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	44.8	9.2	−79.5% Qwen3 Coder Next is 79.5% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,503.48	$405.10	−83.8% Qwen3 Coder Next is 83.8% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	31.62s	6.22s	−80.3% Qwen3 Coder Next is 80.3% 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 (Max): 79.5% less intelligence, 83.8% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 80.3% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker GLM-5.3 (Max): what beats it Qwen3 Coder Next: 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 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 (Max)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/qwen3-coder-next · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/glm-5-3/qwen3-coder-next?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill