Claude Opus 5 vs GLM-5.2
Anthropic's Claude Opus 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
GLM-5.2 is the cheaper option — roughly 4.7x less on a blended workload, and it suits mit-licensed coding agents. Claude Opus 5 justifies its premium when you need most teams' best claude starting point.
Anthropic • Claude 5
$5.00 / $25.00
/ 1M tokens (input / output)
A step change over Opus 4.8 on deep reasoning and long-horizon agentic work, at half Fable 5's price and with the freshest knowledge cutoff in the Claude line. Anthropic's own guidance is that most teams should benchmark Opus 5 before paying for Fable 5.
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 72% cheaper than Claude Opus 5 on input tokens.
Output price
GLM-5.2 is 82% cheaper than Claude Opus 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 Opus 5 | GLM-5.2 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light — 1M in / 200K out | $10 | $2 | $8 |
| Moderate — 10M in / 2M out | $100 | $23 | $77 |
| Heavy — 100M in / 20M out | $1,000 | $228 | $772 |
Specification comparison
| Attribute | Claude Opus 5 | GLM-5.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Input (/ 1M tokens) | $5.00 | $1.40 |
| Output (/ 1M tokens) | $25.00 | $4.40 |
| Cached input | $0.50 | $0.26 |
| Context window | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Max output | 128,000 tokens | 131,072 tokens |
| Native reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2026-05 | 2026-02 |
| Relative latency | medium | medium |
| Open weights | No | MIT |
| API model ID | claude-opus-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 Opus 5 if…
- Agentic engineering with a cost ceiling
- Deep research and analysis
- Test-time compute scaling
- Production assistants needing recent knowledge
Choose GLM-5.2 if…
- Coding agents on large repositories
- Long-horizon refactors
- Self-hosted agent stacks
- Structured output pipelines
Frequently asked
Is Claude Opus 5 or GLM-5.2 cheaper?
GLM-5.2 is cheaper. On a blended 3:1 input-to-output workload it costs about 4.7x less than Claude Opus 5.
Which has the larger context window, Claude Opus 5 or GLM-5.2?
Both accept up to 1M tokens, so context is not a differentiator here.
Should I use Claude Opus 5 or GLM-5.2?
Pick Claude Opus 5 for most teams' best claude starting point. Pick GLM-5.2 for mit-licensed coding agents. If cost dominates the decision, GLM-5.2 wins; if you need the capability ceiling, benchmark both on your own evals before committing.