GLM against GPT and Claude, on facts only.

Availability

Eligibility decides this before price does.

Sign-up needs no mainland-China company entity and no mainland-China phone number. A new dashboard account starts with $2 of trial credit.

Both providers in the table publish a list of the countries and territories they serve. Check that list first, because no price comparison matters if the account cannot exist.

Quickstart

Copy-paste API request.

Swap the model identifier for any ChinaAPI row in the table above. If your code already targets an OpenAI-compatible client, the base URL and the key are the only changes.

Store the key in an environment variable and keep it out of source control.

curl -X POST https://api.chinaapi.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CHINAAPI_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "glm-5.2",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello from ChinaAPI"}]
  }'

Scope

Why there is no quality column here.

Every row on this page is a number you can check against a published source: a price, a context window, or a statement about who may open an account. There is no row for reasoning, coding or instruction-following, because we have not measured them. Our bench harness is not published yet, and until it is, a ranking from us would be a preference presented as a measurement.

That is a real limitation, not a hedge, so here is the position it leaves us with: use this page to rule options out on cost, context and account eligibility, and use your own evaluation set to choose among whatever survives. If a comparison page tells you which model is smarter and shows you no task, no sample count and no failure definition, it is selling something.