Zhipu AI vs DeepSeek

Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right tool

Zhipu AI

🔴Developer

Foundation Models

A Chinese foundation-model company offering the GLM family and related enterprise model services.

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Starting Price

20 million tokens advertised

DeepSeek

🔴Developer

Foundation Models

Chinese frontier AI lab shipping open-weight reasoning and coding models — DeepSeek-V3, DeepSeek-R1, and DeepSeek-Coder — at order-of-magnitude lower API prices than US frontier labs.

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Starting Price

$0 (permissive license)

Feature Comparison

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FeatureZhipu AIDeepSeek
CategoryFoundation ModelsFoundation Models
Pricing Plans2 listed plans2 listed plans
Starting Price20 million tokens advertised$0 (permissive license)
Key Features
  • • GLM-5.2 open weights and up to 1M-token context
  • • GLM-5V-Turbo visual coding and computer use
  • • GLM-5-Turbo tool calling
  • • Chain-of-thought reasoning with explicit thinking output
  • • 128K token context window
  • • OpenAI SDK-compatible REST API

Zhipu AI - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Model family spans text, coding, vision, and agents
  • ✓GLM-5.2 advertises open weights
  • ✓Homepage offers 20 million trial tokens
  • ✓Specialized agents and fine-tuning support builders

Cons

  • ✗Paid English pricing was not retrievable
  • ✗Regional support and hosting need confirmation
  • ✗Long-context claims require retrieval testing
  • ✗Computer-use agents need strict permissions

DeepSeek - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Open-weight frontier models under a permissive license — self-hosting on Together, Fireworks, Groq, or own GPUs is realistic
  • ✓OpenAI-compatible API with explicit context-cache discounts drops into existing SDK code with just a base-URL change
  • ✓Order-of-magnitude lower per-token pricing than US frontier APIs for comparable reasoning and coding capability

Cons

  • ✗Data residency and policy concerns lead many US enterprises to avoid the official PRC-hosted API
  • ✗R1 reasoning traces are verbose, so output token spend and latency can balloon without careful budgeting
  • ✗Tool-calling and structured-output reliability still trails Claude and GPT for complex multi-step agent loops

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🔒 Security & Compliance Comparison

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Security FeatureZhipu AIDeepSeek
SOC2——
GDPR——
HIPAA——
SSO—✅ Yes
Self-Hosted—✅ Yes
On-Prem—✅ Yes
RBAC—✅ Yes
Audit Log—✅ Yes
Open Source—✅ Yes
API Key Auth—✅ Yes
Encryption at Rest—✅ Yes
Encryption in Transit—✅ Yes
Data Residency—China (hosted API); user-controlled (self-hosted)
Data Retention——
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