In short
How they differ.
Worked out from the figures below. Prices and specs are the makers' own, read Oct 20, 2026.
- DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is cheaper per output token: $1.20 against $4.40 per million tokens, so GLM-5.3 costs 3.7 times as much.
- Both can be downloaded and run on your own machine.
- On the 2 independent boards that rank both, each places higher on 1.
Side by side
The specs.
| DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 | GLM-5.3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | DeepSeek · China | Z.ai (Zhipu AI) · China |
| Released | Oct 17, 2026 | Not stated |
| Price per 1M tokens | $0.30 in / $1.20 out (peak-hours price) | $1.40 in / $4.40 out |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Takes in | text, image | text |
| Download and run it yourself | Yes (MIT) | Yes (glm-5.3 (license tag shown on Hugging Face)) |
| Size | 552B backbone parameters parameters, 8B per token during prefill, 16B during decode active | 753B (Hugging Face safetensors size field) parameters |
| Maker says | “Stronger benchmark performance, faster task completion, and shorter outputs than the previous version.” | “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 | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 | GLM-5.3 |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities IndexEpoch AI, Oct 20, 2026 | Not listed | #30155.91 |
| Humanity's Last ExamScale AI | Not listed | #15 |
| SWE-Bench ProScale AI, Sep 22, 2026 | Not listed | #9 |
| Vals IndexVals AI, Oct 19, 2026 | #8 | #9 |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0Vals AI, Oct 19, 2026 | #17 | #12 |
| Vibe Code BenchVals AI, Oct 18, 2026 | #11 | Not listed |
More comparisons