Which is cheaper, GLM-4.5-Air or Qwen3.8-27B?
As of August 20, 2026, GLM-4.5-Air is 64% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. GLM-4.5-Air costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.10 per million output tokens ($1.30 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Qwen3.8-27B costs $0.45 / $3.20 per million tokens ($3.65 blended). Sources: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing and https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/pricing. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
How much does GLM-4.5-Air vs Qwen3.8-27B cost per million tokens?
GLM-4.5-Air Z AI API pricing is $0.20 input and $1.10 output per million tokens via Z AI. Qwen3.8-27B Qwen API pricing is $0.45 input and $3.20 output per million tokens via Qwen. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Which is better for coding, GLM-4.5-Air or Qwen3.8-27B?
GLM-4.5-Air has a published SWE-bench Verified score of 57.6%. Qwen3.8-27B does not have that eval on this page yet.
What is the context window for GLM-4.5-Air vs Qwen3.8-27B?
GLM-4.5-Air supports a 131K token context window, while Qwen3.8-27B supports 262K tokens. Qwen3.8-27B 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.
Which model performs better on benchmarks, GLM-4.5-Air or Qwen3.8-27B?
Qwen3.8-27B leads on 3 of 3 shared benchmarks versus GLM-4.5-Air'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.
Is GLM-4.5-Air or Qwen3.8-27B better for production use?
Both GLM-4.5-Air and Qwen3.8-27B are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, GLM-4.5-Air 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.
Can I switch between GLM-4.5-Air and Qwen3.8-27B in my app?
Yes. Call GLM-4.5-Air through Z AI and Qwen3.8-27B 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.
How accurate is this GLM-4.5-Air vs Qwen3.8-27B pricing data?
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://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/pricing. 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.
What is the output token limit for GLM-4.5-Air and Qwen3.8-27B?
GLM-4.5-Air supports up to an unspecified number of output tokens per request, while Qwen3.8-27B supports up to an unspecified number of output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Which model has better throughput, GLM-4.5-Air or Qwen3.8-27B?
Neither GLM-4.5-Air nor Qwen3.8-27B 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.
How do I switch the models in this GLM-4.5-Air vs Qwen3.8-27B comparison?
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open GLM-4.5-Air or Qwen3.8-27B from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
