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Step 5 Preview vs GLM 5.3 Flash: price, context and ranking
As of 18 October 2026, Step 5 Preview costs $1.00 per million input tokens and $2.70 per million output tokens; GLM 5.3 Flash costs $0.048 and $0.20. On the LMArena text leaderboard GLM 5.3 Flash scores 1,470.5 against 1,441.4 for Step 5 Preview, a gap of 29.1 points.
- Score gap
- 29.1
- Blended price
- $1.425 / $0.086
LMArena
per 1M tokens
Side by side
| Field | Step 5 Preview | GLM 5.3 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Stepfun | Z.ai |
| Input price per 1M tokens | $1.00 | $0.048 |
| Output price per 1M tokens | $2.70 | $0.20 |
| Blended price per 1M tokens (3:1) | $1.425 | $0.086 |
| Context window | 1,048,576 | 1,048,576 |
| LMArena score | 1,441.4 | 1,470.5 |
| LMArena rank | 73 | 29 |
| Arena score per dollar | 1,011.5 | 17,098.8 |
| Usage share, 7 days | 8.3% | 7.5% |
| Providers | 4 | 34 |
| Added to OpenRouter | 2026-10-08 | 2026-08-26 |
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper, Step 5 Preview or GLM 5.3 Flash?
GLM 5.3 Flash is cheaper at a blended $0.086 per million tokens (three parts input to one part output), against $1.425 for Step 5 Preview.
Which scores higher on LMArena, Step 5 Preview or GLM 5.3 Flash?
GLM 5.3 Flash ranks higher on LMArena (1,470.5 against 1,441.4).
Which has the longer context window, Step 5 Preview or GLM 5.3 Flash?
Both models have a context window of 1.05M tokens.
Methodology and sources
The catalogue, prices, context lengths and provider counts come from OpenRouter's public Models API. They are fetched every day at 06:00 Istanbul time and stored as a daily snapshot. Weekly changes are calculated by Oesnada by comparing those snapshots; there is no data before 16 October 2026.
Usage shares are calculated from the daily token totals of OpenRouter's Data API: a model's tokens over the past 7 days divided by all tokens in the same period, including the aggregated long tail outside the top 50. Token counts come from each provider's own tokenizer and are not directly comparable across providers. The data is published by OpenRouter under CC BY 4.0. Variants such as ":free" are counted separately, so shares here can differ from OpenRouter's own ranking page.
Quality rankings come from LMArena's text (overall) leaderboard. A model is matched only when its name matches exactly; if a model has several listings, the highest-scoring one is used. "Frontier" means a model in the LMArena top 15.
"Best value" divides the LMArena score by the blended price (three parts input to one part output). Arena scores are not a linear scale, so the ratio is a rough guide. This page is produced automatically.
- OpenRouter Models API
- OpenRouter Rankings (Data API) (CC BY 4.0)
- LMArena leaderboard dataset (CC BY 4.0)
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Cite this page
Oesnada, "Step 5 Preview vs GLM 5.3 Flash: price, context and ranking", https://oesnada.com/ai-models/compare/stepfun-step-5-preview-vs-z-ai-glm-5-3-flash, accessed 18 October 2026.