Head-to-head comparison
GLM 4.5 Air (Z.ai) and GLM 5V Turbo (Z.ai) compared on the ModelCap Index, API price, context window, provider availability, weight access and every public benchmark board they share. Figures are the same ones shown on the live rankings; nothing here is a hidden score.
Snapshot as of 22 September 2026
As of 22 September 2026, GLM 5V Turbo holds the stronger ModelCap Index position (#45 vs #112); GLM 4.5 Air is 4.7× cheaper per output token ($0.85/1M vs $4.00/1M); GLM 5V Turbo offers the longer context window (203K vs 131K tokens); and GLM 4.5 Air ships open weights.
Evidence: 2 public benchmark observations across 2 boards · 2 public benchmark observations across 2 boards. Prices are the lowest listed API offer per million tokens observed on the OpenRouter catalogue.
Scores are the sources' own published figures for each model's best evaluated configuration; ModelCap never re-runs a benchmark.
Want a different pairing? Open the interactive comparison tool to swap either model for any current ranked language model.
GLM 5V Turbo ranks higher on the ModelCap Index as of 22 September 2026: #45 against #112. That is a capability ranking built from public benchmark evidence with published uncertainty; whether it is "better" for you also depends on price, context and where you can run it. Their published uncertainty intervals do not overlap, but the aggregate Index does not predict performance on every task; compare the relevant benchmark configurations before choosing.
GLM 4.5 Air is cheaper on output tokens: $0.85/1M against $4.00/1M. Input tokens are $0.13/1M for GLM 4.5 Air and $1.20/1M for GLM 5V Turbo. Prices are the lowest listed API offer ModelCap observed, in USD per million tokens. For 1,000 requests with 2,000 input and 500 output tokens each (2M input + 0.5M output), the listed-rate estimate is $0.69 for GLM 4.5 Air versus $4.40 for GLM 5V Turbo. GLM 4.5 Air costs 84.4% less in this scenario. This excludes caching, batch discounts, prompt-length tiers, tool charges and retries; verify the selected endpoint before budgeting.
GLM 5V Turbo has the larger context window: 203K tokens against 131K.
Arena coding: GLM 4.5 Air 1427, GLM 5V Turbo 1489 — GLM 5V Turbo leads.
GLM 4.5 Air: Open weights. GLM 5V Turbo: API only. Open weights mean the checkpoint can be downloaded and self-hosted under its licence; API-only models are available solely through hosted endpoints.
ModelCap currently lists 3 API providers for GLM 4.5 Air and 1 for GLM 5V Turbo, from the OpenRouter catalogue snapshot the site serves; each model page lists the providers and their prices.
Every figure comes from the sealed ModelCap dataset published 22 September 2026; the page re-renders within a minute of each data refresh, and the ModelCap Index positions are the same ones shown on the live rankings.