G2

Rifani A.

Founder

Media Production

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

10/16/2026

"Compounding Value: Better Models, Smooth Integrations, and a Powerful Chat Workspace"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Z.ai?

The value, and it keeps compounding. I signed up back in the early GLM-4.7 days and got in on an early-bird deal: the GLM Coding Plan at $36 per year. That specific offer doesn’t exist anymore (the current entry plan starts at $18/month), but it says a lot that I came for the price and stayed for the capability. I now run GLM-5.3 and Flash daily inside their harness, ZCode for coding, plus the z.ai chat workspace for research, writing, and documents. The models keep getting better under me (4.7 → 5 → 5.3) without me changing any tooling or workflows. The chat workspace delivered benefits I didn’t expect from what I thought was a coding tool: Search mode gives cited answers and quietly replaced a lot of my manual research; AI Slides turns rough notes into a presentable deck in minutes; artifacts preview in-chat so I can iterate on HTML without setup; and the models output real .docx / .pdf / .xlsx files, so formatted PRDs and reports come straight out of the chat instead of me fighting templates. Integrations and setup are the boring kind of good: the API is OpenAI-compatible, so switching my agents (Claude Code, PI, Codex-style CLIs) was one base-URL + API-key change and my existing workflows kept running. Performance, credit where it’s due: there was a stretch when the user base grew fast and peak hours got noticeably slow, but that’s been fixed, these days it’s steady even at busy times, and I run long agent sessions without babysitting.. Onboarding took under 10 minutes, and the docs and community are responsive on their Discord channel. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Z.ai?

Most of what annoyed me early on has been fixed (the peak-hour slowness from when the user base exploded is gone). The early-bird pricing is gone. I joined at $36/year back in the GLM-4.7 days; today’s entry plan is $18/month. Still great value, but I wish there were a cheaper light tier. Chat and ZCode feel like separate islands. I’d love to start something in the z.ai chat workspace and continue it in ZCode (or the reverse). Today I copy-paste context between the two. Same-family products, but the handoff and a shared project view aren’t there yet. AutoClaw is its own separate product too. Z.ai’s newer work agent is promising, but it stands apart from the rest : separate app, separate sessions, and no clean way to carry context between it, the chat, and ZCode. I’d love these to eventually feel like one suite instead of three products from the same family. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Z.ai solving and how is that benefiting you?

I was refuse to pay around $200/month across “premium” AI subscriptions. Now I get frontier-class models and agent tooling for a fraction of that, I got in early at $36/year, and today’s entry plan is $18/month, That was a cut my AI tooling bill by roughly 90% and removed the “is this request worth it?” math from my day. I use AI everywhere it actually helps now: reviews, research, writing, automation. The other thing I struggled with: getting real work off my plate. Refactors, test coverage, PR reviews, boilerplate where all of it needed my hands, or it got postponed. Now the GLM Coding Plan’s raw capability handles it: GLM-5.3 running in Claude Code and ZCode lets me describe an outcome and supervise, also multi-hour agent runs edit across files, write and run tests, and fix their own failures. The result is several hours reclaimed every week: legacy-module refactors and test coverage that used to eat an afternoon now finish while I’m doing something else. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.