Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

GLM-4.7-Flash vs Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct

GLM-4.7-Flash scores 63 (B) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct's 52.6 (D), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct leads on reach. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

GLM-4.7-Flash B

Best for Agents and developers who want a small, permissively licensed tool-calling model on one 24 to 32 GB GPU or Mac, in almost any runtime

Ahead on

  • Capability, 59 against 25
  • Agent interface, 85 against 60

Watch for

No change to the files since 29 January 2026 and no zai-org reply on discussions since 31 January

Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct D

Best for An agent with 4 GB or more to spare that needs a local model to read images, documents and video

Ahead on

  • Reach, 95 against 80

Watch for

No safety evaluation, agent-use guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runGLM-4.7-FlashQwen3-VL-4B-InstructEdge
Capability35%355925GLM-4.7-Flash +34
Reach25%258095Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct +15
Risk20%205555even
Agent interface10%108560GLM-4.7-Flash +25
Documentation and upkeep10%102831Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct +3
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 63/100D 52.6/100

Facts side by side

FactGLM-4.7-FlashQwen3-VL-4B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorZ.ai (Zhipu AI)Alibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-01-292025-11-01
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews2.8/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

GLM-4.7-Flash

A small MIT-licensed mixture-of-experts model with about 3B active parameters, for local agent and coding work with several tool calls per turn and optional thinking. It runs in Ollama at about 23 GB and in nearly every common runtime. The main risk is neglect, with no changes or replies since early February and no safety results.

Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct

A small vision-language cousin for reading screenshots, documents, charts and video, running in about 3.5 GB from Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. It has no thinking mode, and Qwen hasn't answered repository questions or published safety work, so add your own guardrails before letting it drive a GUI.

Before you call either

GLM-4.7-Flash

  1. On our reference machine start it with vllm serve zai-org/GLM-4.7-Flash --max-model-len 65536 --tool-call-parser glm47 --reasoning-parser glm45 --enable-auto-tool-choice --served-model-name glm-4.7-flash
  2. Or run ollama run glm-4.7-flash for the 19 GB q4_K_M build
  3. Without the glm47 and glm45 parsers, tool calls and reasoning come back as plain text
  4. Use a released vLLM (0.32.0 or later) or SGLang (0.5.22 or later); the card's nightly and pull-request builds date from January 2026
  5. Pass chat_template_kwargs: {"enable_thinking": false} for short tasks, since thinking is on by default
  6. Set clear_thinking: false to keep earlier reasoning in multi-turn agent work, as Z.ai does for τ²-Bench and Terminal Bench
  7. Set the context length yourself, since config.json allows 202,752 tokens and tokenizer_config.json says 128,000

Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:4b-instruct
  2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:4b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 4b-instruct
  3. With the GGUF, load the mmproj vision file too, or images won't be read
  4. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags, or use SGLang's --tool-call-parser qwen
  5. Use the card's sampling, temperature=0.7, top_p=0.8, top_k=20, presence_penalty=1.5 for vision and temperature=1.0, top_p=1.0, top_k=40, presence_penalty=2.0 for text
  6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
  7. vLLM needs 0.11.0 or later and Transformers 4.57.0 or later

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, GLM-4.7-Flash or Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct?

GLM-4.7-Flash scores 63 (B) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct's 52.6 (D), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct leads on reach.

Other comparisons with GLM-4.7-Flash or Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct

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