Minimax vs GLM: A Retrospective on 3 Months With Chinese AI Models

Botimus Prime ran on these two models after Claude got too expensive.

I spent about three months building and managing my openclaw bot. I named him Botimus Prime. Somewhere in there I realized how expensive Claude was to run all day, and I needed a cheaper engine.

Privacy isn't my biggest concern, so Minimax and GLM looked like good alternatives. This Minimax vs GLM retrospective is what I learned from actually living with both.

Why I Went Looking for a Cheaper Model

Running an always-on agent on Claude adds up fast. Botimus Prime was working in the background constantly, and the API bill made that hard to justify.

GLM and Minimax both promised strong performance for a fraction of the cost. I'd been curious about both. An always-on bot was the perfect excuse to put them through real work instead of benchmarks. For the record, I still rate Claude the best for hands-on coding, which I get into in my Gemini vs Claude review. This was about cost, not quality.

GLM Is Amazing at Coding

GLM is amazing at coding. For the cost, it's probably comparable to Sonnet 4.6 or even Opus 4.6 in a lot of ways.

It's my go-to coding agent because it just does a great job. The first version of this website was built using opencode and GLM 5.1. That's not a small task, and GLM handled it. If you want one takeaway from this whole post, it's that GLM 5.1 is a serious coding model and the price makes it almost unfair.

What surprised me most was how rarely it got stuck. I expected a cheaper model to flail on anything tricky and need constant correction. Instead GLM worked through real problems, like wiring up routing and handling edge cases, with the kind of follow-through I'd normally expect to pay a lot more for. It's not literally as good as Claude for hands-on coding. It's close enough that for an always-on bot doing routine work, the price difference makes Claude hard to justify.

Minimax Is a Weak Coder but a Strong Orchestrator

Minimax is not great at coding, and I wouldn't usually recommend it for that.

Where it beats GLM is orchestration. Minimax 2.5 and 2.7 became my go-to orchestration bots and tool callers. They're good at running the show and spawning other agents when work needs to get done.

So inside Botimus Prime, Minimax sits on top. It calls the tools and delegates. When code needs writing, it spawns GLM 5.1 coding agents that work together, then report back to a final GLM 5.1 agent at the end of the session. Minimax directs traffic. GLM does the building. That split is the setup that actually worked for me.

The reason to separate the roles is that orchestration and coding are different skills. An orchestrator needs to break a goal into steps, decide which tool or sub-agent handles each one, and keep track of the whole job. A coder needs to sit down and write correct code for one well-defined task. Minimax thinks well about the plan and the handoffs. GLM executes the individual pieces. Trying to make one model do both well is how you get a bot that either plans nicely and codes badly or codes nicely and loses the thread. Splitting them fixed that.

How I'd Recommend Running GLM (Use OpenRouter)

Z.ai and Minimax are both great offerings, and they do different jobs. I heavily recommend GLM 5.1.

I'd add one caveat. Run it through OpenRouter instead of z.ai directly. Z.ai has had some uptime issues that make it hard to recommend on its own. OpenRouter has fewer of those problems and still lets you use the z.ai coding plan, so you get the price and the reliability together.

For an always-on bot, uptime is everything. A model that's brilliant but down for an hour is worse than a model that's merely good and always there. When z.ai had a wobble, Botimus Prime would just stall mid-job. Routing through OpenRouter smoothed that out without giving up the cheap z.ai coding plan. You get the same model at the same price with a more reliable front door. If you're putting GLM into production for anything that runs unattended, do this from day one.

What 3 Months Taught Me About Minimax vs GLM

The lesson from this Minimax vs GLM run is that you don't have to pick one. They're good at different things, so I use them for different things.

GLM 5.1 is my coding workhorse and the better all-around recommendation. Minimax 2.5 and 2.7 are my orchestrators that manage the GLM agents underneath. Together they run an always-on bot at a cost that Claude couldn't touch for that use case.

If you're building your own openclaw or hermes agent and the API bill scared you off, this is a setup worth trying. Have you run either of these in production? I'd like to hear how they held up for you on LinkedIn.