Is GLM 5 a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats GLM 5 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 5 is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 44.7 higher and costs 50% less, with a covering envelope. 12 of 145 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
MiMo-V2.6-Pro is both better and cheaper than GLM 5: 44.7 points higher on LMArena and 50% less per million tokens, $0.545 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1446.3
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$1.09/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1491.0
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.540/M
GLM 5 takes text, returns up to 128,000 tokens from a 204,800-token context, and is listed by 8 sellers.
Compared against 145 rated, priced models on this lens: 8 models dominate it and give up nothing, none does so with a trade-off. GLM 5 scores 1446.3 at $1.09 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.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| MiMo-V2.6-Pro | 1491.0 +44.7 | $0.540/M | 50% |
| GLM 5.3 | 1471.4 +25.1 | $1.00/M | 8% |
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1469.6 +23.3 | $0.238/M | 78% |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 1465.0 +18.7 | $0.544/M | 50% |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | 1462.5 +16.2 | $0.182/M | 83% |
| MiMo-V2.6-Flash | 1456.4 +10.1 | $0.175/M | 84% |
| Kimi K2.6 | 1455.5 +9.2 | $0.961/M | 11% |
| Qwen3.7 Plus | 1454.6 +8.3 | $0.560/M | 48% |
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