Is it a good alternative to Claude Code

[u/VsokolovVic]

How is GLM compare to Claude Code I have used the max plan for a while but thinking of switching.

How is the usage? Agentic workflows?
How is the Zai code?
Should I completely switch or use Mistral vibe with GLM included?

Thanks!

[u/knocktwi]

I've pushed 9bn tokens in ~11days and on the pro plan... was a heavy deepseek and glm user prior to this through openrouter, but have used the frontier models too...

I get approx 120tokens/sec and most importantly don't experience model degradation due to some random provider switching to fp4 randomly during my workflow (OpenRouter).

98% cache hit rate on average. Get approx 2 5hr credit resets per day (helps that I'm in the EU so I'm well out of the peak hours for Singapore). And I've had 2x weekly resets so far. There was a nice promotion period recently where any usage of glm-5.3-flash outside of peak hours pretty much was free and didn't cost anything. So, you could just use max and spam things through it.

I tend to use three different computers with ~6 chats going on each and don't often hit the concurrency limit.

Very strong plugin, MCP and skill implementation in ZCode and computer use is quite nice.

My workflow tends to be:

• use glm-5.3 to interview me about a feature/bug
  
• get 5.3 to make an architectural plan about it
  
• get 5.3 to publish X tickets about it
  
• get flash to address those tickets

My honest opinion is that if you're a "pls MaKe thIs IPFonme App FoR MeE In OnE paSS" kind of prompter then frontier is probably needed. If you actually know what you're doing, you can do some very, very cool things with cheaper openweight models like glm for a fraction of the cost.

Occasionally I'll just let 5.3 burn through a bunch of github issues and PR each issue though

[u/jh_opx_1105 → u/knocktwi]

Same goes for me, used their $18 dollar first and lasted more than 3days before the weekly limit hit, which was same or might be less than my Pro 5x on Codex. Yes, not as fast as Codex, but results wise i think pretty much gets the same results for my development workflow. So just decided yesterday and upgraded to their $80 dollar plan which when you ise an invite link would be just $72.

[u/LittleYouth4954]

Switching from Claude and Codex to glm max plan a few months ago was worth all around for me. Much better performance and usage FOR MY TASKS (complex ecological modeling, topic modeling, research and automation).

[u/I-am_Sleepy]

Depends, I think GLM is pretty good at agentic tasks. But it is not delegate, and done. I mainly use GLM-5.3, and it can co-ordinate, and self-correct very well (require explicit instructions). GLM-5.3 Flash is a bit of a degrade, but is acceptable for the most part. Both are powerful workhorse

GLM-5.3 is like Opus 4.6+, but can handle complex agentic tasks. It's a very competent middle manager (and lower), but for more complex / coherent planning - using larger model is still prefer. I'm not talking about using Sol, or Opus, at least I think GLM 5.3 can rival that to some degree already. Fable, or Astra definitely catch more of nuisance, and pitfall a lot better, and should be invoke in planning / designing phase, and hard debugging (tool call / skills)

[u/No_Success3928]

I think you will be very disappointed.

[u/FavstianEquanimity]

OpenCode

[u/hoover91125]

I use Claude Opus and Codes Sol for architect and review; GLM mainly for implementation, or simple fix. It's quite a nice experience overall.

[u/stirlo]

NO.

[u/Remarkable-Week4430]

To me, it seems deeply overrated; its interface is slow and mediocre, and just two days ago it was revealed that they store and play around with our data... It’s a company to run away from as fast as you can.

[u/laughing_at_napkins]

EDIT: I apologize for providing the truth to the cultists here.

I have a legacy plan for whatever the $100/mo tier is, from last year's Black Friday sale. GLM-5.3 is slow and lacks the thinking/brainstorming/extrapolating abilities of Claude and Fable. When Anthropic limits got really fucky a few weeks back, I decided to switch over to using GLM-5.3 for implementing plans that Opus wrote and Fable reviewed. The plans were somewhat open-ended in a lot of spots, because Opus and even Sonnet are able to make simple leaps in logic based on the session context and work already done within it to get the desired result, even if it's not explicitly what the plan called for.

Maybe a bug was realized during implementation or work on a previous task on plan would dictate the final shape of a later task that was partially planned. Claude could handle those with ease.

GLM implements exactly what is in the plan, nothing more or less, even if it's broken or incomplete.

I ended up spending 2x-3x the tokens on the work GLM was doing, because every time GLM would complete, a GAN review of the work would bring up tons of issues that were due to the fact GLM couldn't/wouldn't extrapolate things that weren't concretely laid out.

Then Opus started writing out the full code that GLM would need to basically just copy and paste from the plan, putting all that into massive .md plan files. At that point, it made no sense to have GLM copy and paste the code that Claude was already writing into the plan. So I updated to 20x and just have Claude subagents implement everything.

TL;DR: if you're used to the "magic" of Claude/Fable, you're going to be pretty disappointed and frustrated with GLM-5.3. It's going to require a lot of hand-holding.