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LLM Index

GLM vs. Qwen

A side-by-side comparison of release history, capabilities, licensing and model sizes.

Attribute GLM Qwen
Developer Z.ai Alibaba Cloud
Current generation GLM-5.2 Qwen 3.8
Initial release 2022-08-04 2023-09-13
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes Yes
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License MIT Mixed; Apache 2.0 open weights and hosted previews
Model sizes 744B (40B active) Undisclosed for Qwen 3.8 preview
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GLM

GLM is Z.ai's open-weight model family for reasoning, coding, agents, and long-horizon work. GLM-5.2 is the current generation with a one-million-token context window.

The GLM family began with bilingual pretrained models and evolved through the ChatGLM and GLM-4 generations. GLM-5 scaled the mixture-of-experts architecture to 744B total parameters with 40B active parameters. GLM-5.2, released in June 2026, adds a stable one-million-token context window, stronger long-horizon coding and agent performance, adjustable reasoning effort, and efficiency improvements for sparse attention. Its weights are available under the MIT license.

Further reading

Qwen

Qwen is Alibaba's broad family of open and hosted models for reasoning, coding, multimodal understanding, and agents. Qwen 3.8 Max Preview is the current generation.

Qwen, formerly Tongyi Qianwen, is a family of language and multimodal models developed by Alibaba. It includes general-purpose, coding, vision-language, audio, embedding, and reasoning variants. Qwen 3.8 Max Preview is the current hosted flagship, with support for multimodal and agentic workflows. Earlier Qwen generations, including Qwen 3.6 checkpoints, remain available as Apache 2.0 open weights; availability and licensing should therefore be checked per model.

Further reading

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