Codex vs Claude Code.

Benchmarks.

Terminal-Bench measures agents completing real command-line tasks. Version 2.1 fixes 28 of the 89 tasks in 2.0: some depended on internet resources that had changed, some had budgets too tight for valid solutions, and some had instructions that did not match their tests.

Selected rows from the Terminal-Bench 2.1 leaderboard.

The newest models are missing

Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol have no runs on the board yet, so the headline compares a September OpenAI model with a June Anthropic one.

Each CLI adds points to its own model

Claude Fable 5 scores 83.8% in Claude Code and 80.4% in Terminus 2, the benchmark’s neutral harness; GPT-5.5 scores 83.1% in Codex CLI and 78.0% in Terminus 2. That gap of 3 to 5 points is the closest public measure of the CLIs themselves, as opposed to the models.

Older comparisons quote older runs

A page that quotes 77.3% against 65.4% is quoting GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 on Terminal-Bench 2.0, two generations and one benchmark revision ago.

SWE-bench Verified has saturated

On Vals’ leaderboard, last updated 1 September, Claude Opus 5 scores 97.0%, GPT-5.6 Sol 96.2% and Claude Fable 5 95.0% in the same mini-SWE-agent harness, and Vals no longer runs it on new models. A 0.8-point gap near the ceiling is noise.

Prices.

Both sell the agent inside a chat plan, and both start at $20 a month.

For teams, a ChatGPT Business seat and a Claude Team standard seat both cost $25 a month billed monthly, or $20 billed annually.

At the API

At the API the two price ladders match almost exactly, per million tokens of input and output.

Usage limits.

Both throttle on rolling windows, and neither publishes one number that holds for every account.

What a session costs.

Measured, not estimated: every interactive session we ran in the Starkomand repository from 11 September to 11 October 2026, priced at the API list rates above. The two agents did different work in those sessions, so read this as one team’s month, not as a benchmark.

What the numbers show. In both agents, re-reading context cost more than writing: output was a quarter of Claude Code’s spend and an eighth of Codex’s, although about 97% of all input tokens came from cache, which both vendors bill at a small fraction of the input price. Per response, long sessions were no dearer than short ones ($0.10 against $0.13 in Claude Code and $0.08 against $0.09 in Codex, longest quarter of sessions against shortest), so a session cost what it did because of how many responses it ran. The costliest tenth of sessions took 42% of each agent’s spend.

How we measured. Both CLIs log every model response’s token counts on your own machine: Claude Code under ~/.claude/projects/, Codex under ~/.codex/sessions/. We counted each response once, priced it at the vendor’s published rates, including Anthropic’s cache-write and OpenAI’s cached-input rates, and kept interactive sessions in this one repository. Claude Code’s own cost records for the same sessions came within 4% of our total. Codex’s auto-review checks run on codex-auto-review, which has no published API price, so their tokens, 8% of Codex’s total, are left out.

On a plan, none of this is a bill. A Claude or ChatGPT plan meters the same work against its usage windows instead of charging per token, and Claude Code’s docs say the session cost in /usage is meant for API users. The list-price figure is what the same work would cost on an API key, which is the number to hold against a $20, $100 or $200 plan.

Your own numbers. In Claude Code, /usage shows the current session’s tokens and their cost at list price, and on Pro and Max what counts against your plan limits. In Codex, /status shows the session’s token usage and remaining limits, and /usage shows your account’s token activity by day or week.

A third tool.

The three-way searches, Cursor vs Claude Code vs Codex and Gemini CLI vs Claude Code vs Codex among them, ask whether a third tool displaces the top two. For paid daily terminal work it does not, but each one changes something.

• Cursor

  An AI editor first, which also ships a CLI, cursor-agent. Cursor CLI with Grok 4.5 scores 79.3% on Terminal-Bench 2.1. Hobby is free with limited agent requests; Pro is $20 a month.

  Pick it if you want to read and edit diffs inline in an editor.

  The Cursor agent in Starkomand

• Gemini CLI

  On 18 June 2026 Google stopped serving Gemini CLI requests for free, Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra individual accounts, and asked users to move to Antigravity CLI. Gemini Code Assist licenses and API keys still work, but the old free-tier advice no longer applies to individuals.

  Google’s transition announcement

• Antigravity

  Google’s agent-first IDE and the way on for Gemini CLI users. The Individual plan is $0, with unlimited Tab completions and Command requests and “basic weekly rate limits” on agent work, for which Google publishes no number.

  Pick it if you want an agent IDE for nothing and can live inside an unquantified cap.

  Antigravity pricing

• OpenCode

  An open-source terminal agent that works with any provider, including models on your own machine. The software is free and the inference is not: you pay whichever provider you point it at, and you own the setup.

  Pick it if you want to choose the provider yourself.

  OpenCode in Starkomand

Running both in Starkomand.

Starkomand is ours, so this is the one section about it. What plain terminals do not give you is the movement of work between them, and that is what we built it for. It runs on macOS with Apple silicon only and needs no Starkomand account: each CLI runs in a real terminal window on one canvas, signed in with your own Claude and ChatGPT plans.

Plan in one, build in the other

Open Agent actions in the Claude Code window, choose Hand off… and pick Codex. The brief carries the objective and acceptance criteria, and the Codex window lands wired to the source.

Review with the other model family

In Settings → Workflows, set the Review workflow’s receiving agent to the other CLI. Build and review then sends the finished work to a fresh reviewer from the other vendor.

See which allowance has room

Settings → Usage meters shows one ring per signed-in agent with its five-hour and weekly resets. Past 90%, that agent’s model chip turns amber and offers Hand off to keep going →.

Continue after a limit

When Claude Code cannot take another turn, the model chip’s Continue from recorded conversation starts Codex from the conversation the app recorded.

Read across windows

An agent can read another window’s transcript by name, so the plan does not need retyping.

Redirect by voice

Hold Option and speak to an agent by name.

We have not measured whether this makes anyone faster. What it changes is that both allowances get used, and a task survives either one running out.