Z.ai: GLM 5.3 FlashX vs Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B (free)
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-04.
| Z.ai: GLM 5.3 FlashX | Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B (free) | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | z-ai | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 55.6 |
| Input Price | $0.37/M | Free |
| Output Price | $1.25/M | Free |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 131,072 | 235,929 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 55.6 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.8 27B (free) costs $0 and GLM 5.3 FlashX costs $0.68, so Qwen3.8 27B (free) is free for the same work.
GLM 5.3 FlashX reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Qwen3.8 27B (free).
Across the 18 tasks where they differ, GLM 5.3 FlashX scores higher on 3 (Code Completion, Code Documentation, CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup), Qwen3.8 27B (free) on 15 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
GLM 5.3 FlashX was released in September 2026 and Qwen3.8 27B (free) in August 2026.
Pick GLM 5.3 FlashX if you need long documents; pick Qwen3.8 27B (free) if you need lower cost or the stronger all-round task scores.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | Z.ai: GLM 5.3 FlashX | Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B (free) |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 133 | 137 |
| Code Review | 132 | 137 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 130 |
| Code Refactoring | 136 | 136 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 141 |
| Unit Test Generation | 124 | 127 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 131 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 125 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 123 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 128 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 132 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 130 |
| ETL Scripting | 128 | 130 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 132 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 130 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 138 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 126 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 125 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →