DeepSeek vs Z.ai

DeepSeek

Pick DeepSeek for the price-performance of the API and the open weights, not for the chat app, which is a plain assistant without the connectors and workspace features the big consumer products now carry. For a developer paying per token it is hard to beat; for a company with data-residency rules the China-hosted service and PRC-law terms settle the question before quality does.

Pros

• +Flash output at $1.20 per million tokens peak and $0.60 off-peak undercuts every Western frontier API by a wide margin
• +Open-weight releases mean the models can be run locally or on any cloud, with no lock-in to the hosted service
• +1M-token context on both current models, with cached-input pricing that makes long agent loops cheap
• +Chat app is free on web, iOS and Android with no tier to upgrade to

Cons

• −Terms are governed by the law of mainland China and the operator is a Hangzhou company, which rules it out for many regulated buyers
• −Peak and off-peak pricing by UTC window makes budgeting and benchmarking fiddly
• −Concurrency caps (2,500 for Flash, 500 for V4-Pro) and periodic capacity squeezes hit production workloads
• −The chat product trails ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude on connectors, projects and team features

Z.ai

Z.ai is worth knowing about mainly because of what's behind it: Zhipu AI is one of the few foundation-model companies with a public listing, and GLM's context window and agentic tool-use benchmark competitively against larger US labs. The free chat is a fine general assistant, but most of the value for developers sits in the metered API and coding subscription rather than the consumer chat page.

Pros

• +Free web chat with no signup friction for basic use
• +API pricing undercuts several Western foundation-model providers per token
• +1M-token context window on the flagship GLM line

Cons

• −Company and data handling are based in China, which rules it out for some compliance policies
• −Model naming and version numbers change frequently, making comparisons harder to track
• −English-language documentation lags behind the Chinese-language originals in places

Is DeepSeek cheaper than Z.ai?

Z.ai starts at $10/mo. DeepSeek has a free tier; what its paid plans cost is not confirmed by us yet.

Does DeepSeek or Z.ai have a free tier?

Both: DeepSeek has a free tier, and Z.ai has a free tier.

Which has a public API, DeepSeek or Z.ai?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.