Head to head
GLM-5.2 vs DeepSeek V4 Pro
Which is better, GLM-5.2 or DeepSeek V4 Pro?
GLM-5.2 finishes ahead of DeepSeek V4 Pro on the index, 87.1 to 86.8, and leads on all four scores: craft, speed, control and value. Both are scored on the same rubric, in the same week, and neither placing is sponsored.
Updated
GLM-5.2
06 of 53
87.1
Frontier-class output, an MIT licence, and a million tokens of context. That combination is the story.
DeepSeek V4 Pro
07 of 53
86.8
A reasoning model at the frontier, published under MIT, priced like an afterthought.
The four scores, side by side
| Score | GLM-5.2 | DeepSeek V4 Pro | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Craft | 84 | 86 | +2 |
| Speed | 82 | 74 | +8 |
| Control | 95 | 94 | +1 |
| Value | 92 | 90 | +2 |
| Index score | 87.1 | 86.8 | +0.3 |
Which to pick
GLM-5.2 is the safer pick on every axis we score. DeepSeek V4 Pro earns its place in the index, but nothing in these four numbers argues for it over GLM-5.2.
GLM-5.2
GLM-5.2 is the model that makes the open-versus-closed argument concrete. It trades blows with the closed flagships on coding and general reasoning, it takes a million tokens of context, and the weights are published under MIT with no user threshold and no field-of-use clause. You can run it, tune it, ship it inside a product and never send a byte to anyone. Nothing else in this index offers that much capability on those terms.
Where it shines
- MIT licence with no user-count or field-of-use restrictions
- Competitive with closed flagships on coding benchmarks
- Million-token context on weights you can hold yourself
DeepSeek V4 Pro
Pro is DeepSeek's reasoning flagship: a very large sparse model that thinks before it answers and lands close to the best closed models on mathematics and code. The remarkable part is not the benchmark, it is that the weights are MIT-licensed and the hosted API still costs a fraction of any Western equivalent. It is slower than Flash, and it should be, since the thinking is the product.
Where it shines
- Frontier-adjacent reasoning at open-weights prices
- MIT licence, including for the reasoning traces
- Very long context, so whole repositories fit in one call