Zhipu’s open-weight flagship with reasoning, agents, and a free ChatGLM app.
GLM-4 is what you reach for when you want frontier-ish quality you can actually own. is one of the fastest-evolving AI tools we track. We put it through real daily tasks — same as a working professional would — and scored output quality, speed, pricing, and how it fits an actual stack.
Who it's for: Builders who self-host, Chinese-speaking teams, and developers who want agents without lock-in.
GLM-4 and ChatGLM variants are downloadable and self-hostable.
Strong tool use and multi-step agent workflows out of the box.
1M-token context on GLM-4-Long for books and codebases.
Paired image generation via CogView for multimodal tasks.
GLM-4 is one of the best open-weight options for agentic workflows and long documents. If you need the absolute best English reasoning, Claude or GPT still win — but GLM-4 is free to run and that changes the math for many teams.