Best LLM for Summarization
Summarization is one of the most forgiving tasks for a cheaper model: the source text does most of the work, and you mainly need faithful compression rather than deep reasoning.
Best value pick
GLM-4.7-Flash
Z.ai (Zhipu AI) · Overall Arena 1353 · about $29.00/month at 100,000 calls. The top-ranked Kimi K3 costs $1,200.00/month — you save $1,171.00/month with GLM-4.7-Flash.
| 1 | GLM-4.7-Flash | 1353 | $29.00 | Z.ai (Zhipu AI) |
| 2 | Step 3.5 Flash | 1404 | $30.00 | StepFun |
| 3 | GLM-4.7-FlashEst. | 1353 | $30.50 | AWS Bedrock |
| 4 | Llama 4 Scout | 1332 | $33.50 | Meta |
| 5 | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | 1330 | $35.00 | |
| 6 | DeepSeek V4 Flash | 1430 | $35.00 | DeepSeek |
| 7 | MiMo-V2.5 | 1427 | $35.00 | Xiaomi |
| 8 | Gemini 2.0 Flash | 1354 | $35.00 | |
| 9 | MiMo-V2-Flash | 1395 | $35.00 | Xiaomi |
| 10 | MiMo-V2-Omni | 1422 | $35.00 | Xiaomi |
| 11 | DeepSeek V3.2 | 1420 | $63.00 | DeepSeek |
| 12 | Hunyuan Hy3 | 1444 | $70.00 | Tencent |
Intelligence scores are community Arena ratings from LMArena / arena.ai, used under CC BY 4.0. Snapshot last refreshed 28 July 2026. Scores are a relative signal, not an absolute measure of capability. A Measured score was voted on directly; an Estimated score is inherited from an identical base model (a regional/creator-prefixed hosting duplicate). See our methodology.
Why picking isn’t obvious
Because summarization is input-heavy (long documents in, short summaries out), input token price matters far more than output price. A cheap model with a large context window often beats a pricey one on cost per document at equal quality.
FAQ
What is the best value LLM for summarization?
GLM-4.7-Flash is the cheapest model that still clears our quality bar for this task, at about $29.00/month for 100,000 calls (1,500 in / 500 out). It scores 1353 on the Overall Arena.
Is the most expensive model worth it for this?
Kimi K3 tops the Overall Arena but costs about $1,200.00/month here — roughly $1,171.00/month more than GLM-4.7-Flash for 120 extra Arena points. For most workloads that gap is not worth the premium.
Cite / link to this page
You’re welcome to reference this page and its figures with attribution and a link back.
https://aicalculatorpro.com/best-llm-for/summarization/<a href="https://aicalculatorpro.com/best-llm-for/summarization/">Best LLM for Summarization — AI Calculator Pro</a>