In short
How they differ.
Worked out from the figures below. Prices and specs are the makers' own, read Oct 20, 2026.
- GLM-5.3 is cheaper per output token: $4.40 against $10 per million tokens, so Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs 2.3 times as much.
- GLM-5.3 can be downloaded and run on your own machine; Claude Sonnet 5.5 can't.
- On the 5 independent boards that rank both, Claude Sonnet 5.5 places higher on 5 and GLM-5.3 on 0.
Side by side
The specs.
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | GLM-5.3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Anthropic · US | Z.ai (Zhipu AI) · China |
| Released | Sep 28, 2026 | Not stated |
| Price per 1M tokens | $2 in / $10 out | $1.40 in / $4.40 out |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Takes in | text, image | text |
| Download and run it yourself | No | Yes (glm-5.3 (license tag shown on Hugging Face)) |
| Size | Not published | 753B (Hugging Face safetensors size field) parameters |
| Maker says | “High-performance model for coding and agents” | “GLM-5.3 is Z.ai's latest flagship model, delivering comprehensive advancements in complex software engineering” |
| Sources | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description |
Independent tests
Where they place.
Position on each board we follow (1 is best). Epoch AI's and Vectara's scores are shown; the other boards are linked for their own figures.
| Board | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | GLM-5.3 |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities IndexEpoch AI, Oct 20, 2026 | #6164.45 | #30155.91 |
| LMArena WebDevLMArena, Oct 19, 2026 | #3 | Not listed |
| LMArena mathLMArena, Oct 15, 2026 | #15 | Not listed |
| LMArena Agent ArenaLMArena, Oct 19, 2026 | #5 | Not listed |
| Humanity's Last ExamScale AI | #6 | #15 |
| SWE-Bench ProScale AI, Sep 22, 2026 | #8 | #9 |
| Vals IndexVals AI, Oct 19, 2026 | #1 | #9 |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0Vals AI, Oct 19, 2026 | #2 | #12 |
| Vibe Code BenchVals AI, Oct 18, 2026 | #1 | Not listed |
| ProofBenchVals AI, Oct 12, 2026 | #1 | Not listed |
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