Z.ai (Zhipu GLM) vs Qwen
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
Open-weights frontier LLM family from Zhipu AI
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Qwen
Alibaba's LLM family: open Qwen3 weights plus closed Qwen3.7-Max
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.6 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 |
| Capability | ||
| Value for money | ||
| Ease of use | ||
| ASEAN readiness | ||
| API quality | ||
| Pricing | Freemium | Open Source |
| Free tier | GLM-4.7-Flash and GLM-4.5-Flash are free for all registered users | Open-weight Qwen3 models free to download and self-host |
| Paid from | Lite ~$10/mo, Pro ~$30/mo, Max ~$80/mo (quarterly billing); API from $1.20/1M tokens | Qwen3 Max preview API priced per-token on Alibaba Cloud |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✗ | ✓ |
| Users | — | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally |
| Founded | 2019 | — |
| Maker | — | Alibaba Group |
| Verdict | The GLM series is still the strongest value play among frontier-adjacent APIs, and 2026 made Zhipu impossible to ignore: a January Hong Kong IPO (the first listed LLM company), GLM-5 in February, and GLM-5.2 in June with... |
Qwen is Alibaba's flagship LLM family and a cornerstone of the open-weight ecosystem — the Qwen3 line ships freely on Hugging Face from small dense models up to large MoE sizes. Capability is frontier-adjacent on coding,... |
| Full review → | Full review → |
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Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.