Z.ai

Z.ai is the chat product for the GLM model family. Alongside ordinary assistant work it leans hard into building things: ask it for a landing page, a small web app, a slide deck, or a data visualisation and it will produce a runnable artifact rather than a description of one.

What it is good at

• Coding and app building. GLM's recent releases are competitive on agentic coding evaluations and are widely used through coding agents as well as the chat UI.
• Long-horizon tasks. Multi-step work — research a topic, gather sources, produce a document — holds together better than a single-turn model would manage.
• Artifacts. Generated pages and apps render immediately so you can iterate visually.
• Open weights. GLM models are released openly, which means the same capability is available for self-hosting and through third-party inference providers.

Access

Free to use with paid plans for higher limits, plus an API and coding-plan subscriptions aimed at developers who want to drive it from an editor or agent. A practical choice if you want frontier-ish coding help without frontier pricing.