Is GLM 4.5V a good deal?

Whether anything in this catalogue beats GLM 4.5V on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.

12 undominated of 145 · Oct 6, 2026

As of Oct 6, 2026, GLM 4.5V is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 158.2 higher and costs 40% less, with a covering envelope. 12 of 145 rated, priced standard models are undominated.

Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements

Current model

GLM 4.5V

Balanced

3 tokens in per 1 out

MiMo-V2.6-Pro is both better and cheaper than GLM 4.5V: 158.2 points higher on LMArena and 40% less per million tokens, $0.360 cheaper at this mix.

GLM 4.5V

LMArena Elo · higher is better

Scale starts at 1040 Elo

1332.8

Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better

$0.900/M

MiMo-V2.6-Pro

LMArena Elo · higher is better

Scale starts at 1040 Elo

1491.0

Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better

$0.540/M

GLM 4.5V takes text, image, returns up to 16,384 tokens from a 65,536-token context, and is listed by 2 sellers.

Compared against 145 rated, priced models on this lens: 26 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. GLM 4.5V scores 1332.8 at $0.900 per million tokens for this mix.

Envelope-safe replacements

Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.

ModelLMArenaEffective $/MYou save
MiMo-V2.6-Pro1491.0 +158.2$0.540/M40%
GLM 5.3 Flash1469.6 +136.8$0.238/M74%
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash1462.5 +129.7$0.182/M80%
MiMo-V2.6-Flash1456.4 +123.6$0.175/M81%
Qwen3.7 Plus1454.6 +121.8$0.560/M38%
Gemma 4 31B1443.4 +110.6$0.205/M77%
Qwen3.8 27B1440.7 +107.9$0.562/M38%
Qwen3.5 397B A17B1438.0 +105.2$0.878/M3%
Qwen3.6 Plus1436.7 +103.9$0.731/M19%
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite1434.7 +101.9$0.850/M6%
Gemma 4 26B A4B 1433.9 +101.1$0.127/M86%
MiniMax M31432.1 +99.3$0.485/M46%
GPT-5.6 Luna1431.0 +98.2$0.450/M50%
MiMo-V2.51427.5 +94.7$0.175/M81%
Qwen3.5-122B-A10B1417.1 +84.3$0.715/M21%
Gemini 2.5 Flash1417.0 +84.2$0.850/M6%
Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview1415.7 +82.9$0.563/M38%
Inkling Small1413.7 +80.9$0.638/M29%
Qwen3.5-27B1408.9 +76.1$0.536/M40%
Qwen3.5-Flash1397.0 +64.2$0.114/M87%
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B1394.4 +61.6$0.355/M61%
GPT-6 Luna1391.5 +58.7$0.200/M78%
GLM 4.6V1376.8 +44.0$0.450/M50%
GPT-5 Mini1373.2 +40.4$0.688/M24%
GPT-5.4 Nano1372.1 +39.3$0.463/M49%
Nova 2 Lite1361.8 +29.0$0.850/M6%

Higher score, lower price, named losses

Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.

ModelLMArenaEffective $/MYou give up
MiMo-V2.5-Pro1465.0$0.544/Mimage
Hy31440.7$0.231/Mimage
GLM 4.61439.9$0.760/Mimage
GLM 4.71435.5$0.738/Mimage
DeepSeek V4 Flash 04231432.1$0.113/Mimage
MiMo-V2.6-Pro1491.0 · $0.540/MGLM 4.5V1332.8 · $0.900/MLMArena EloEffective $/M · Balanced
145 rated, priced standard models. Chartreuse is the frontier. Cobalt is the model you named, when it is not on the staircase.

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Evidence & Ask