Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite vs GLM-5.2
Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite 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
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite is the cheaper option — roughly 3.8x less on a blended workload, and it suits ultra-cheap high-volume tasks. GLM-5.2 justifies its premium when you need mit-licensed coding agents. Only GLM-5.2 does native reasoning, which matters for multi-step tasks but adds billable thinking tokens.
Google • Gemini 3.1
$0.25 / $1.50
/ 1M tokens (input / output)
Google's efficiency tier and a long-term stable target, priced for workloads measured in millions of calls rather than thousands. It gives up the deeper reasoning of 3.5 Flash, so it suits mechanical tasks — classification, extraction, moderation — where a million tokens of context still helps but chain-of-thought does not.
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 5.6x the price than Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite on input tokens.
Output price
GLM-5.2 is 2.9x the price than Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite 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 | Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite | GLM-5.2 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light — 1M in / 200K out | $1 | $2 | $2 |
| Moderate — 10M in / 2M out | $6 | $23 | $17 |
| Heavy — 100M in / 20M out | $55 | $228 | $173 |
Specification comparison
| Attribute | Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite | GLM-5.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Input (/ 1M tokens) | $0.25 | $1.40 |
| Output (/ 1M tokens) | $1.50 | $4.40 |
| Cached input | — | $0.26 |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Max output | 65,536 tokens | 131,072 tokens |
| Native reasoning | No | Yes |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2025-01 | 2026-02 |
| Relative latency | low | medium |
| Open weights | No | MIT |
| API model ID | gemini-3.1-flash-lite | 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 Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite if…
- Content moderation at volume
- Classification and routing
- Lightweight summarization
- Cheap long-context retrieval
Choose GLM-5.2 if…
- Coding agents on large repositories
- Long-horizon refactors
- Self-hosted agent stacks
- Structured output pipelines
Frequently asked
Is Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite or GLM-5.2 cheaper?
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite is cheaper. On a blended 3:1 input-to-output workload it costs about 3.8x less than GLM-5.2.
Which has the larger context window, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite or GLM-5.2?
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite has the larger window at 1.05M tokens versus 1M.
Should I use Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite or GLM-5.2?
Pick Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite for ultra-cheap high-volume tasks. Pick GLM-5.2 for mit-licensed coding agents. If cost dominates the decision, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite wins; if you need the capability ceiling, benchmark both on your own evals before committing.