Updated for Week 45, 2026

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs GLM-5.3

On our Week 45, 2026 scores, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash edges ahead (84 vs 82). Pick DeepSeek V4.1 Flash for cheap reasoning at scale. Pick GLM-5.3 for self-hosting.

DeepSeek V4.1 FlashGLM-5.3
MakerDeepSeekZ.ai
ReleasedSeptember 10, 2026August 28, 2026
Price / 1M tokens$0.3 in / $1.20 outNot published
Open weightsYesYes
Power Rankings rank#12 (84)—
Best Value rank#4 (90)—
Open-Weight Watch rank#1 (90)#2 (89)
Coding rank—#11 (82)
Best for
  • Cheap reasoning at scale
  • Self-hosting with a permissive license
  • Batch jobs you can schedule off-peak
  • Self-hosting
  • Private deployments
  • Fine-tuning
Strengths
  • Joint top released open-weight model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5 (32, level with GLM-5.3)
  • MIT license, so commercial use is straightforward
  • About $0.26 per Artificial Analysis index task, against $1.24 for Gemini 3.8 Flash
  • LMArena text score of 1483 (Max)
  • Open weights
  • GLM-5.3-Flash costs $0.075 / $0.25
Watch out for
  • Prices double during DeepSeek's weekday peak hours
  • 552B parameters is far too big for a home PC
  • Hosted by a Chinese company, so check data rules before sending anything sensitive to its API
  • Uses a custom license, so check it before commercial use
  • 753B parameters needs serious hardware

The short version

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: DeepSeek's 552-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with MIT-licensed weights and a 1M-token context window. An updated 1017 snapshot arrived on October 17, 2026.

GLM-5.3: A 753-billion-parameter model with downloadable weights. GLM-5.3 is the strongest open-weight model on the board right now, and there's a cheap Flash sibling too.

Rankings change every week. Check the latest standings or swap in a different model.