Open Source AI Showdown 2026: Llama 4 vs Gemma 4 vs DeepSeek V4 vs GLM-5.1

Open source AI models are beating paid models now. GLM-5.1 scored #1 on SWE-Bench Pro, ahead of Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4. And it's free under MIT license. As of April 2026, four open-source LLMs stand out. Here's how they compare. Quick Comparison Llama 4 Maverick Gemma 4 DeepSeek V4 GLM-5.1 Developer Meta Google DeepSeek Z.ai (Zhipu) Parameters 400B (17B active) 26B (3.8B active) ~1T (37B active) 744B (40B active) Context 1M tokens 256K 1M tokens — License Llama License Apache 2.0 MIT MIT Local Run Difficult 18GB RAM Difficult Difficult API Price $0.19/M Free (local) $0.30/M Subscription All four use MoE (Mixture of Experts) architecture — like a buffet that prepares every dish but serves each guest only what they need. Llama 4 Maverick — The 1M Token Giant 400B total parameters with 128 experts, but only 17B active per inference. The biggest weapon is the 1 million token context window — the widest among open-source models. MMLU 85.5%, highest among open models. But the Llama Lice