- Use
qwen-3.6-plusfor the best default - Use
kimi-k2.6for tool-heavy agents - Use
deepseek-r1for hard reasoning - Use
gemini-2.5-flashfor 1M context
Quick decision guide
Use cases that matter
1. I just need one model
Start withqwen-3.6-plus.
That is the right answer most of the time if you are building:
- a chatbot
- a coding assistant
- an internal copilot
- a general-purpose product feature
2. I am building an agent
Start withkimi-k2.6.
If your agent:
- calls tools
- works across multiple steps
- reads screenshots or other visual context
- needs long sessions
kimi-k2.6 is the best first pick.
If you want a text-only engineering alternative, try glm-5.1.
3. I care about cost
Start withdeepseek-v3 for strong value.
If the workload is more repetitive and automation-heavy than quality-sensitive, consider:
glm-4.5-airgpt-oss-120b
4. I need deep reasoning
Usedeepseek-r1.
This is the right pick for:
- hard analysis
- logic-heavy tasks
- math
- planning where quality matters more than speed
5. I need long context
Usegemini-2.5-flash.
If you want cheaper long-context throughput and do not need multimodal input, look at glm-4.7-flash.
6. I need live web data
Usesonar (alias search).
It runs a real-time web search on every request and returns a current, cited answer — for news, prices, releases, and anything that changes after a model’s training cutoff. For deeper multi-step research and longer reports, use sonar-pro.
Both bill a small flat web-search fee on top of tokens (see pricing), and neither supports tool calling — the search happens internally, so you just ask a question.
Multimodal
Image and video models bill per call (or per second of video) instead of per token, and run through a separate async endpoint - see/v1/images/generations and /v1/videos/generations.
Image (per-image pricing)
Video (per-second pricing)
All five video models accept an
image_url to switch into image-to-video mode without changing the model ID.
Canonical sources
For the current live catalog, use:Switching models
You do not need to change your integration. Just change themodel parameter: