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AI Choice Engine

Model comparison

GLM 5.3 Flash vs Qwen3-235B-A22B

Z.ai against Qwen, compared on context, price, and verified benchmark results.

Catalog record checked September 26, 2026Individual provider fields may changeEvidence confidence: High — see receipts below

Z.ai

GLM 5.3 Flash

Balanced · Open weights

vs

Qwen

Qwen3-235B-A22B

Balanced · Open weights

AI model capability comparison
SpecificationGLM 5.3 FlashQwen3-235B-A22B
ProviderZ.aiQwen
TierBalancedBalanced
Context windowWinner: 1.05M128K
Max outputWinner: 131K33K
Input / 1M tokensWinner: $0.15$0.70
Output / 1M tokensWinner: $0.50$2.80
WeightsOpenOpen
Parameters320B total / 18B active (MoE)235B total / 22B active (MoE)
Reasoning levelsNot verifiedUnverifiedlow, high, max
Modalitiestext, image, videotext
LicenseMITApache 2.0
API model idglm-5.3-flashqwen3-235b-a22b
ReleasedAugust 26, 2026April 29, 2025
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (2026-09-26)Winner: 41.89.5
SWE-bench Verified (2026-09-01)92Not verifiedUnverified
Terminal-Bench 2.1 (2026-08)84.3Not verifiedUnverified
DeepSWE 1.1 (2026-08)63.4Not verifiedUnverified
Humanity's Last Exam (2026-08)55.3Not verifiedUnverified

Prices are USD per million tokens at standard rates, excluding batch and caching discounts. Bold indicates the better figure where one is objectively better. Values we could not confirm from the provider are shown as “Not verified” rather than estimated.

Benchmark receipts

Where each score comes from, and how far it can be compared across models.

Pricing tiers

GLM 5.3 Flash: $0.15/$0.50 per MTok on Z.ai's first-party API (cached input $0.03); third-party hosts (GMI, Novita, Together) list the same $0.15/$0.50. No promo tier is listed. The faster GLM-5.3-FlashX costs $0.37/$1.25.

Qwen3-235B-A22B: Model Studio International $0.70 input / $2.80 output per MTok (non-thinking); thinking-mode output $8.40. Open weights (Apache 2.0) for self-hosting; 32,768-token recommended output.

BalancedOpen weightsRecord checked September 26, 2026

GLM 5.3 Flash

GLM 5.3 Flash is Z.ai's natively multimodal open-weight workhorse — 1M context, hybrid sparse/linear attention, near-flagship Intelligence Index at a fraction of the cost.

Best for

  • Cost-efficient long-context
  • Multimodal input
  • Coding agents

Watch out

Self-hosting needs ~186GB GPU memory at 4-bit (multi-GPU). Third-party hosts charge more than Z.ai's own API.

BalancedOpen weightsRecord checked September 26, 2026

Qwen3-235B-A22B

Qwen3-235B-A22B is Alibaba's widely deployed open-weight MoE — 235B/22B, strong price-performance.

Best for

  • Open-weight deployments
  • Self-hosting
  • Multilingual

Watch out

Needs multi-GPU for the 235B total; hosted rates vary.

When the cheaper one wins

GLM 5.3 Flash is cheaper on output at $0.50 per million tokens against $2.80 for Qwen3-235B-A22B — about 5.6×. Use the cheaper tier for classification, extraction, summarisation, and any task where the expensive model’s extra score does not change the accepted output. The expensive one only pays if your hardest task actually fails on the cheap tier. These are standard-tier API rates, excluding batch and cache discounts.

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Evidence confidence: High

How strong and complete the evidence behind this comparison is — not a prediction of which model is better.

  • Pricing verified on both sides — Input and output rates are verified for both models.
  • 4/5 core specs verified on both sides — Not published for at least one side: reasoning levels.
  • 1 shared named benchmark with differing scores — Measured on: Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
  • Verified within the last 90 days — Newest catalog check was 2 days ago.
  • Both models carry source citations — Each side has at least two catalog sources on record.

Source receipts

Each catalog figure was checked against the provider or an independent second source on the date shown.

Related comparisons

Diving deeper on one model? GLM 5.3 Flash · Qwen3-235B-A22B

Common questions

GLM 5.3 Flash vs Qwen3-235B-A22B

Answered from the verified figures on this page rather than general guidance.

Is GLM 5.3 Flash or Qwen3-235B-A22B cheaper for input?
GLM 5.3 Flash is cheaper at $0.15 per million input tokens, against $0.70 for Qwen3-235B-A22B — roughly 4.7× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate. These are base rates; GLM 5.3 Flash has tiered pricing: $0.15/$0.50 per MTok on Z.ai's first-party API (cached input $0.03); third-party hosts (GMI, Novita, Together) list the same $0.15/$0.50. No promo tier is listed. The faster GLM-5.3-FlashX costs $0.37/$1.25. Qwen3-235B-A22B has tiered pricing: Model Studio International $0.70 input / $2.80 output per MTok (non-thinking); thinking-mode output $8.40. Open weights (Apache 2.0) for self-hosting; 32,768-token recommended output.
Is GLM 5.3 Flash or Qwen3-235B-A22B cheaper for output?
GLM 5.3 Flash is cheaper at $0.50 per million output tokens, against $2.80 for Qwen3-235B-A22B — roughly 5.6× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate. These are base rates; GLM 5.3 Flash has tiered pricing: $0.15/$0.50 per MTok on Z.ai's first-party API (cached input $0.03); third-party hosts (GMI, Novita, Together) list the same $0.15/$0.50. No promo tier is listed. The faster GLM-5.3-FlashX costs $0.37/$1.25. Qwen3-235B-A22B has tiered pricing: Model Studio International $0.70 input / $2.80 output per MTok (non-thinking); thinking-mode output $8.40. Open weights (Apache 2.0) for self-hosting; 32,768-token recommended output.
Which has the larger context window, GLM 5.3 Flash or Qwen3-235B-A22B?
GLM 5.3 Flash accepts 1.05M tokens against 128K for Qwen3-235B-A22B. This only matters if you routinely send very long documents or large codebases.
Should I use GLM 5.3 Flash or Qwen3-235B-A22B?
Both sit in the balanced tier, so the choice usually comes down to price and context rather than capability. GLM 5.3 Flash suits cost-efficient long-context; Qwen3-235B-A22B suits open-weight deployments.

Next step

Choosing between them

The verified figures that separate this pair, computed from the catalog rather than restated boilerplate.

  • Input price: GLM 5.3 Flash costs $0.15 per 1M tokens versus $0.70 for Qwen3-235B-A22B — a 4.7x difference at the headline tier.
  • Context: GLM 5.3 Flash takes 1.05M against 128K for Qwen3-235B-A22B — only decisive if your prompts approach the smaller window.
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