DeepSeek’s claim to fame is massively shrinking the per-user memory footprint, enabling many more concurrent users in your fixed hardware footprint. Having more concurrent users leads to much higher overall throughput on that same hardware. That’s why DS is so cheap to host.

See table 2 in this article to see the tradeoffs of overall throughput vs per user latency as an example.

Deepseek would let you host higher concurrency than GLM.

Presumably that compression doesn’t come for free on the quality side. (This is totally speculative on my part. I haven’t personally used DS, and I don’t particularly feel benchmarks correlate well to my own experiences)

If you’ve got a small enough user count, perhaps there are tradeoffs in DeepSeek that are not buying you anything.

I'm not sure I gave Deepseek-v4.1-Flash a fair shot, but in my limited testing, it spends 20 minutes thinking about relatively basic prompts, so even if it's cheaper that GLM, the time saved by GLM-5.3's much more reasonable thinking time/tokens means you end up ahead if you value your own time.

Having used both, they really are comparable for most things, which leaves the cheaper Deepseek a better choice for most folks. The one area that I've found GLM to be a clear winner is in offensive Cyber.

If you run a red team GLM is hard to beat, and most of the providers who want to serve an abliterated model cost significantly more so it makes more sense to spend money on hardware.