---
title: "Cheaper alternatives to GLM 4.6 · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/alternatives/z-ai__glm-4.6/
description: "8 models score at least as high as GLM 4.6 and cost no more on a balanced workload. 4 give up nothing measurable; the other 4 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores."
---

# Cheaper alternatives to GLM 4.6 · Undominated.ai

> 8 models score at least as high as GLM 4.6 and cost no more on a balanced workload. 4 give up nothing measurable; the other 4 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores.

# Cheaper alternatives to GLM 4.6

Z.ai · LMArena 1439.8 · $0.875/M on a balanced workload · prices as of 2026-08-28

## 4 models are both better and cheaper, giving up nothing.

Of the 133 models carrying both an independent score and a published price at the same delivery mode, **8** score at least as high as GLM 4.6 and cost no more under at least one workload. **4** match or beat it on every capability we hold — context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and extended reasoning. **4** do not, and every row names what it drops.

Dominance is not a property of a model. It is a property of a model, a capability lens and a workload, and all three are named on every row. Scores are LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset; prices are blended per million tokens. A higher score is not a drop-in replacement.

This page is built from that comparison and nothing else. When no model is both better and cheaper than GLM 4.6, it is not generated.

## Where it holds

| Workload | GLM 4.6 $/M | Better and cheaper | With a trade |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Balanced | $0.875 | 2 | 3 |
| Summarise | $0.461 | 4 | 3 |
| Chat | $0.980 | 2 | 3 |
| Code gen | $1.37 | 2 | 4 |
| Agentic | $0.487 | 2 | 3 |

Workload mixes are defined on the [methodology page](/methodology/). Cached input is priced at the cached rate, and reasoning tokens at the worse of the reasoning and output rates.

## What you would be replacing

| Intelligence | 1439.8 |
| --- | --- |
| Context window | 205K |
| Max output | 131K |
| Input modes | text |
| Tool use | yes |
| Extended reasoning | yes |

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. [Full record for GLM 4.6](/models/z-ai__glm-4.6/).

## Better and cheaper, nothing given up 4

Each of these matches or beats GLM 4.6 on context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and reasoning, scores at least as high, and costs no more.

| # | Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi | 1465 +25.2 | $0.544 | Balanced −38% Summarise −28% Chat −51% Code gen −52% Agentic −50% |
| 2 | Qwen3.7 Plus Qwen | 1456.2 +16.4 | $0.560 | Balanced −36% Summarise −36% Chat −36% Code gen −36% Agentic −36% |
| 3 | Kimi K2.5 Moonshot AI | 1445.2 tie | $0.432 summarise | Summarise −6% |
| 4 | Qwen3.8 27B Qwen | 1440.8 tie | $0.434 summarise | Summarise −6% |

## Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 4

These score at least as high and cost no more on the two plotted axes, and lose something that is not on them. Read the last column before switching.

| Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under | What you give up |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Gemini 3.7 Flash Google | 1490.2 +50.4 | $0.750 | Balanced −14% Summarise −23% Chat −11% Code gen −9% Agentic −18% | 131K → 66K max output |
| Gemma 4 31B Google | 1441.7 tie | $0.152 | Balanced −83% Summarise −80% Chat −82% Code gen −83% Agentic −79% | 131K → 16K max output |
| Hy3 Tencent | 1441.2 tie | $0.144 | Balanced −83% Summarise −83% Chat −83% Code gen −83% Agentic −83% | 131K → 128K max output |
| GLM 5 Z.ai | 1445.2 tie | $1.35 code gen | Code gen −1% | 131K → 128K max output |

## What this compares, and what it leaves out

 - Quality is LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset. The 95% confidence interval on a difference between two scores is about ±10.68 points, so a gap smaller than that is marked *tie* rather than an improvement — see [significance bands](/significance/).
 - 188 further models at this delivery mode carry a price but no independent score. They are absent from the comparison in both directions — unrated is not a zero, and an unmeasured model is neither an alternative nor a worse buy.
 - Retired models are never offered as an alternative, and a model only competes against its own delivery mode: batch trades latency for price, so it is not a like-for-like swap.
 - Nothing here measures latency, throughput, rate limits or how a model behaves on your prompts. Two models with the same index score are not interchangeable.
 - The models that nothing beats on both axes are on the [value frontier](/frontier/), and every other model something cheaper beats is [listed here](/alternatives/).