Standard Compute
Model comparison 2026

Claude Opus 4.8 vs GLM 5.3

Claude Opus 4.8
Anthropic · Frontier · Proprietary
$11/1M · 1M ctx
GLM 5.3
Z.AI · Frontier · Open weights
$1.50/1M · 1.0M ctx

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality
Correctness and depth of what it produces
Agentic Ability
Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks
Speed
Tokens per second and time-to-first-token
Value for money
How much capability you get per dollar
Reliability
Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Specs and pricing side by side

Spec
Opus 4.8
GLM 5.3
Maker
Anthropic
Z.AI
Blended price / 1M
$11
$1.50
Input / output
$5.00 in · $25 out / 1M tokens
$0.08 in · $4.80 out / 1M tokens
Context window
1M
1.0M
Open weights
No
Yes
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
Yes
Output Quality
9.4
9.3
Agentic Ability
9.2
9.4
Speed
7.2
7.8
Value for money
7.5
9.0
Reliability
9.5
8.8

Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).

Verdict: Opus 4.8 or GLM 5.3?

Updated 2026-10-13

Choose Claude Opus 4.8 if you want hard, high-stakes coding and reasoning where quality matters more than cost. Choose GLM 5.3 if you want open-weight coding agents that need near-frontier agentic ability.

In our editorial scoring, GLM 5.3 leads in 3 of five dimensions (agentic ability, speed and value for money), while Claude Opus 4.8 leads in 2. On price, Claude Opus 4.8 runs about $11 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; GLM 5.3 is about $1.50 and open-weight.

Where Opus 4.8 falls short
  • Among the most expensive models per token
  • Superseded by Claude Opus 5.5, which costs less ($4/$20 vs $5/$25) and scores far higher
Full Opus 4.8 breakdown →
Where GLM 5.3 falls short
  • Custom license with conditions for very large hosting providers
  • Reasoning cannot be turned off
Full GLM 5.3 breakdown →

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