Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Accuracy is too close to call: GLM 5.3 scored 67.5% and Inkling Small 67.5% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
- Inkling Small is 2.0× cheaper per question as billed ($0.00047 vs $0.00093), reasoning tokens included.
- Inkling Small generates text 1.5× faster: 233 tokens per second against 154.
- Inkling Small starts answering sooner: 0.5 s to the first token, against 0.8 s for GLM 5.3.
- GLM 5.3 accepts more context: 1M tokens against 524k.
Which should you choose?
Choose GLM 5.3 for a 1M-token context window and more hosts to choose from on OpenRouter (37 against 1). Choose Inkling Small for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.00069 against $0.0014), faster streaming, a quicker first token and shorter outputs (about 273 tokens per question against 523). The widest subject gap is in engineering: GLM 5.3 answered 10 of 15 correctly, Inkling Small 6 of 15. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap +0.0 points (z = 0.00). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.