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GLM-5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.5

A detailed comparison of GLM-5 (Zhipu AI) and Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Anthropic) across pricing, performance, and features.

Pricing Comparison

MetricGLM-5Claude Sonnet 4.5Difference
Input / 1M tokens$1.00$3.00+200%
Output / 1M tokens$3.20$15.00+369%
Context window200K200K
Max output128K16K

Benchmark Comparison

BenchmarkGLM-5Claude Sonnet 4.5
MMLU-Pro70.4%84.5%
HumanEval91%93%
GPQA72%68.2%

Capabilities

CapabilityGLM-5Claude Sonnet 4.5
code
reasoning
text
tool-use
vision

GLM-5 Strengths

  • Open-weight (MIT license) — self-hostable
  • 77.8% SWE-Bench Verified — top-tier coding
  • 128K max output — huge generation window

GLM-5 Weaknesses

  • MMLU-Pro lags behind Western flagships
  • 744B parameters — heavy to self-host
  • China-based — availability concerns

Claude Sonnet 4.5 Strengths

  • Well-tested and stable
  • Strong coding and analysis

Claude Sonnet 4.5 Weaknesses

  • Superseded by Sonnet 4.6
  • Same price as the newer model

Quick Verdict

Best value: GLM-5 is the more affordable option at $1/$3.2 per 1M tokens.

Higher benchmarks: Claude Sonnet 4.5 scores higher on average across available benchmarks (81.9% avg).

Choose GLM-5 if cost matters most. Choose Claude Sonnet 4.5 if you need the best possible quality for complex tasks.

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