Claude Haiku 4.5 vs GLM-5.2
Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 and Z.ai's GLM-5.2 both target production language workloads, but they price and behave differently. Here is the side-by-side.
Pricing checked against provider documentation on . How we verify
The short answer
Claude Haiku 4.5 is the cheaper option — roughly 1.1x less on a blended workload, and it suits lowest-latency claude responses. GLM-5.2 justifies its premium when you need mit-licensed coding agents.
Anthropic • Claude 4.5
$1.00 / $5.00
/ 1M tokens (input / output)
The fastest model Anthropic ships, still on the Claude 4.5 generation with a 200K window and an early-2025 knowledge cutoff. Worth it when response latency is the product requirement; otherwise Sonnet 5 offers more capability and five times the context for twice the price.
Z.ai • GLM-5
$1.40 / $4.40
/ 1M tokens (input / output)
A 744B-parameter MoE with 40B active, MIT-licensed, and tuned for long-horizon coding work. It sits between DeepSeek and Kimi on price and is the usual challenger when a cheaper model keeps looping or missing repository conventions — enough capability to finish the task without flagship pricing.
Input price
GLM-5.2 is 40% more expensive than Claude Haiku 4.5 on input tokens.
Output price
GLM-5.2 is 12% cheaper than Claude Haiku 4.5 on output tokens — usually the side that dominates the bill.
Monthly cost at three workload sizes
Standard (non-batch, non-cached) rates. Reasoning models will exceed these figures because thinking tokens bill as output.
| Workload | Claude Haiku 4.5 | GLM-5.2 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light — 1M in / 200K out | $2 | $2 | $0 |
| Moderate — 10M in / 2M out | $20 | $23 | $3 |
| Heavy — 100M in / 20M out | $200 | $228 | $28 |
Specification comparison
| Attribute | Claude Haiku 4.5 | GLM-5.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Input (/ 1M tokens) | $1.00 | $1.40 |
| Output (/ 1M tokens) | $5.00 | $4.40 |
| Cached input | $0.10 | $0.26 |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Max output | 64,000 tokens | 131,072 tokens |
| Native reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2025-02 | 2026-02 |
| Relative latency | low | medium |
| Open weights | No | MIT |
| API model ID | claude-haiku-4-5 | glm-5.2 |
| Status | stable | stable |
GLM-5.2: Independently measured by Artificial Analysis; the vendor's own pricing page was unreachable at time of checking. Treat as approximate and confirm in the console.
Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if…
- Real-time chat suggestions
- Lightweight extraction and tagging
- Guardrail and routing calls
- High-frequency background jobs
Choose GLM-5.2 if…
- Coding agents on large repositories
- Long-horizon refactors
- Self-hosted agent stacks
- Structured output pipelines
Frequently asked
Is Claude Haiku 4.5 or GLM-5.2 cheaper?
Claude Haiku 4.5 is cheaper. On a blended 3:1 input-to-output workload it costs about 1.1x less than GLM-5.2.
Which has the larger context window, Claude Haiku 4.5 or GLM-5.2?
GLM-5.2 has the larger window at 1M tokens versus 200K.
Should I use Claude Haiku 4.5 or GLM-5.2?
Pick Claude Haiku 4.5 for lowest-latency claude responses. Pick GLM-5.2 for mit-licensed coding agents. If cost dominates the decision, Claude Haiku 4.5 wins; if you need the capability ceiling, benchmark both on your own evals before committing.