Perplexity Sonar Deep Research vs Z.ai GLM 5.3 Prime
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Sonar Deep Research is 1.2× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- GLM 5.3 Prime accepts longer prompts: 1M vs 128K tokens.
- GLM 5.3 Prime is the newer model (released 2026-09-23).
| Sonar Deep Research | GLM 5.3 Prime | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Perplexity | Z.ai |
| Released | 2025-03-07 | 2026-09-23 |
| Input / 1M | $2.00 | $2.80 |
| Output / 1M | $8.00 | $8.80 |
| Cached input / 1M | — | $0.56 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $3.50 | $4.30 |
| Context | 128K | 1M |
| Max output | 115K | 131K |
| Accepts | text | text |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $8.00 | $8.80 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | — | 99.79% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | Operational | — |
Cost calculator
Sonar Deep Research
$240 per month$8.00 per day
GLM 5.3 Prime
$300 per month$10.00 per day
Sonar Deep Research saves $60.00 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
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