---
title: "Cheaper alternatives to GLM 5.1 · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/alternatives/z-ai__glm-5.1/
description: "5 models score at least as high as GLM 5.1 and cost no more on a balanced workload. 2 give up nothing measurable; the other 3 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores."
---

# Cheaper alternatives to GLM 5.1 · Undominated.ai

> 5 models score at least as high as GLM 5.1 and cost no more on a balanced workload. 2 give up nothing measurable; the other 3 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores.

# Cheaper alternatives to GLM 5.1

Z.ai · LMArena 1464.1 · $1.94/M on a balanced workload · prices as of 2026-08-28

## 2 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, **5** score at least as high as GLM 5.1 and cost no more under at least one workload. **2** match or beat it on every capability we hold — context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and extended reasoning. **3** 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 5.1, it is not generated.

## Where it holds

| Workload | GLM 5.1 $/M | Better and cheaper | With a trade |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Balanced | $1.94 | 1 | 3 |
| Summarise | $1.10 | 2 | 3 |
| Chat | $2.03 | 1 | 3 |
| Code gen | $2.80 | 1 | 3 |
| Agentic | $1.05 | 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 | 1464.1 |
| --- | --- |
| Context window | 205K |
| Max output | 182K |
| 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 5.1](/models/z-ai__glm-5.1/).

## Better and cheaper, nothing given up 2

Each of these matches or beats GLM 5.1 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 | GLM 5.2 Z.ai | 1465.4 tie | $1.83 | Balanced −6% Summarise −6% Chat −6% Code gen −6% Agentic −6% |
| 2 | Muse Spark 1.1 Meta | 1478.3 +14.2 | $1.09 summarise | Summarise −1% Agentic −1% |

## Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 3

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 +26.1 | $0.750 | Balanced −61% Summarise −68% Chat −57% Code gen −55% Agentic −62% | 182K → 66K max output |
| Gemini 3.6 Flash Google | 1476.5 +12.4 | $1.50 | Balanced −22% Summarise −36% Chat −14% Code gen −11% Agentic −24% | 182K → 66K max output |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi | 1465 tie | $0.544 | Balanced −72% Summarise −70% Chat −76% Code gen −76% Agentic −77% | 182K → 131K 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/).