ChatGLM (Zhipu Qingyan)

✓ Editorially verified

Zhipu AI's bilingual ChatGLM assistant with agents, code, image and video generation

Freemium· Free consumer tier (chatglm.cn); paid API tiers via Zhipu Open Platform (bigmodel.cn) priced per million tokens by model (GLM-4, GLM-4-Air, GLM-4-Flash, GLM-4V, CogVideoX); enterprise/private deployment on requestAgentsGLM-4, GLM-4V, GLM-4-Air/Flash, CogView, CogVideoX (ChatGLM family, Zhipu AI / Tsinghua KEG)8.4 / 10

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Best for

Chinese-language teams, mainland China product builders and researchers who need a compliant, multimodal LLM assistant plus an OpenAI-compatible API for RAG and agent apps.

Skip if

English-only users outside China who need frontier reasoning, a rich third-party integration ecosystem, or freedom from mainland content moderation.

ChatGLM, branded as Zhipu Qingyan (智谱清言) on the consumer web, is Zhipu AI's flagship general-purpose assistant built on the ChatGLM/GLM-4 family of large language models developed with Tsinghua University's KEG Lab. The chatglm.cn product wraps the underlying models in a chat UI with agents, long-form writing, code interpreter, browsing, image generation (CogView), video generation (CogVideoX) and a growing marketplace of user-built 'AI apps' (智能体) similar to OpenAI's GPTs. It is one of the strongest China-market alternatives to ChatGPT and Kimi, and one of the few Chinese assistants with a serious multimodal stack and an open-source lineage (ChatGLM-6B, ChatGLM2/3, GLM-4-9B are released on Hugging Face). Typical workflows include Chinese-first document drafting and summarisation, translation between Chinese and English, reading and analysing uploaded PDFs and Office files, running Python in the code sandbox for data analysis and charting, building lightweight domain agents that call custom tools, and generating illustrations or short videos for social content. For developers, the same models are exposed through the Zhipu Open Platform (bigmodel.cn) with an OpenAI-compatible API, function calling, JSON mode, retrieval, fine-tuning and batch inference, which makes it a viable backend for RAG systems and agent frameworks that need to serve mainland Chinese users under local compliance. The product is best understood as the consumer front-door to a full-stack Chinese LLM platform rather than a single chatbot.

Editor's take

ChatGLM is the most credible full-stack Chinese answer to ChatGPT: the consumer app is polished, the multimodal story is real, and the underlying GLM-4 family is one of the few Chinese model lines with a genuine open-source track record. If you ship into mainland China or work heavily in Chinese, it belongs on the shortlist; outside that context it is more interesting as a capable, affordable API than as a daily driver.

— The AI Tool Bible editorial team

Pros

✅ Strong native Chinese comprehension and generation, generally ahead of Western models on Chinese benchmarks and cultural context
✅ Multimodal out of the box: text, vision (GLM-4V), image generation (CogView) and video generation (CogVideoX) in one UI
✅ Agent/GLMs marketplace lets users build and share custom assistants with tools and knowledge bases
✅ Open-source model lineage (ChatGLM-6B, GLM-4-9B) available on Hugging Face for self-hosting and fine-tuning
✅ Developer API is OpenAI-compatible with function calling, JSON mode and competitive per-token pricing
✅ Free consumer tier is generous and does not require a foreign phone number, unlike ChatGPT in mainland China

Cons

⚠️ Consumer site and most documentation are Chinese-only; English UX and support lag behind
⚠️ Subject to mainland China content moderation, which refuses or reshapes politically sensitive prompts
⚠️ Reasoning and coding still trail frontier Western models (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet) on hard English benchmarks
⚠️ Signup for chatglm.cn typically requires a Chinese mobile number, which blocks many overseas users
⚠️ Ecosystem of third-party integrations is much smaller than OpenAI's or Anthropic's

Use cases

Chinese-language document drafting and rewritingChinese-English translation and localisationPDF and Office file Q&ACode interpreter data analysisCustom domain agents (智能体) with toolsIllustration generation with CogViewShort video generation with CogVideoXRAG chatbots for China-market appsFunction-calling agent backends via OpenAI-compatible APIFine-tuning open-source GLM models for private deployment