As of August 20, 2026, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is 61% cheaper per million tokens than GLM-5.3. GLM-5.3 is $1.40 / $4.40 per million input/output tokens versus Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at $0.25 / $2.00. Sources: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing and https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/
Sources: Z AI pricing (https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing); Qwen pricing (https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/)
GLM-5.3
Z AI
Input
$1.40
Output
$4.40
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
Qwen
Input
$0.25
Output
$2.00
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
GLM-5.3Qwen3.5-35B-A3BVerdict
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B offers significantly lower pricing, while GLM-5.3 leads on benchmark performance. Your choice depends on whether cost efficiency or raw capability matters more for your use case.
As of August 20, 2026, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is 61% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $2.00 per million output tokens ($2.25 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). GLM-5.3 costs $1.40 / $4.40 per million tokens ($5.80 blended). Sources: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing and https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
GLM-5.3 Z AI API pricing is $1.40 input and $4.40 output per million tokens via Z AI. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B Qwen API pricing is $0.25 input and $2.00 output per million tokens via Qwen. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B has a published SWE-bench Verified score of 69.2%. GLM-5.3 does not have that eval on this page yet.
GLM-5.3 supports a 1M token context window, while Qwen3.5-35B-A3B supports 262K tokens. GLM-5.3 offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
GLM-5.3 leads on 1 of 1 shared benchmarks versus Qwen3.5-35B-A3B's 0 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both GLM-5.3 and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call GLM-5.3 through Z AI and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B through Qwen with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published Z AI API pricing and Qwen API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing and https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
GLM-5.3 supports up to an unspecified number of output tokens per request, while Qwen3.5-35B-A3B supports up to 65K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Neither GLM-5.3 nor Qwen3.5-35B-A3B has published throughput data on this page yet. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open GLM-5.3 or Qwen3.5-35B-A3B from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. GLM-5.3 costs $1.40/M input and $4.40/M output. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B costs $0.25/M input and $2.00/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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