Claude Code vs Cursor vs Copilot vs Codex CLI: 8 AI Coding Agents Compared

Price: Copilot undercuts everyone who charges at all — but "free" has three different meanings here

On headline subscription price, GitHub Copilot wins outright: $10/month for Pro against $20 for Claude Code, Cursor and Antigravity, and it bundles $15 of included credits ($10 base plus a $5 flex allotment) into that $10. Copilot also puts agent mode on every tier including the $0 Free plan, which is a straight win over Claude Code — the only tool in this group with no free tier at all and therefore no zero-cost way to test whether its limits fit your workflow.

But three products are cheaper still, in different senses. Cline is free and Apache-2.0 licensed with no bundled model tax, so you pay only for inference; Codex CLI is included with ChatGPT plans from Free upward, making it effectively free to trial; and Devin Desktop's free tier is the most generous packaged one here at 25 credits plus unlimited Tab autocomplete, in-IDE previews and a daily deploy. Gemini CLI used to belong in this group and no longer does: its free consumer tier, once 60 requests/minute and 1,000/day, was shut down on 18 June 2026.

Per-task economics are a separate fight, and Cursor wins it on the only hard number anyone here supplies: $0.07 per task on the Coding Agent Index, roughly 10x to 60x cheaper than the two agents ranked above it. Nothing else in this round-up publishes a comparable figure.

Predictable billing: nobody is good at this, but the failure modes differ sharply

Every paid tool here has a cost-transparency problem, and ranking them is mostly a matter of picking your poison. Claude Code is the least quantified: usage runs against a five-hour rolling window plus a weekly cap with no published figures, and the 5x jump from $20 Pro to $100 Max strongly implies the entry tier won't sustain real agentic work. Copilot and Cursor are both metered — Copilot gives no guidance on what a typical agent run costs in credits and pushes you to pay-as-you-go top-ups when you run dry, while Cursor's low per-task cost is spread across six tiers that still make monthly spend hard to forecast. Cursor at least tells you the unit price ($0.50/$2.50 per 1M tokens standard); Copilot doesn't.

Antigravity is the clear loser on stability rather than arithmetic: four quota cuts in four months between December 2025 and March 2026 reportedly locked paying Pro users out for days at a time, free-tier limits were reduced, and the top tier was repriced from $249.99 to $200. Devin Desktop's problem is different again — its published pricing is inconsistent across sources, which makes budgeting hard before you even start. Cline is the honest outlier: its costs are unpredictable too, but they're unpredictable in a way you control, since you choose the provider and model and can drop to a local Ollama or LM Studio endpoint.

Capability and context: Cursor has the numbers, Codex CLI and Gemini CLI have the window

Cursor is the only product in this comparison that brings verified generational evidence to the table, and it's the reason it takes the top rating: SWE-Bench-Pro-Hard-AA performance jumped from 12% to 47% on exactly the hard multi-file work these agents are sold for. Set that against Devin Desktop, which has no public controlled or reproducible benchmark of quality, speed, recovery or real-world cost, and whose headline "13x faster than Sonnet 4.5" claim is vendor-supplied and independently unverified. On evidence, that's not close.

Context is the one place Cursor loses. Its 200,000-token window is merely adequate for a tool built around repository-scale reasoning, and both terminal agents beat it fivefold: Codex CLI offers up to 1,000,000 tokens on GPT-5.4 and Gemini CLI the same 1M. If whole-repo reasoning in one pass is your bottleneck, the cheap terminal tools out-spec the expensive editor.

Claude Code competes on scope instead of scores. It searches the codebase, runs commands and sub-agents, and edits across many files rather than suggesting snippets — and MCP support makes it extensible into internal tools and data. Antigravity's pitch is narrower but genuinely unmatched here: a controlled Chrome instance lets agents visually verify their own front-end changes, closing a loop every other product in this group leaves open, plus an Agent Manager orchestrating up to five parallel agents. No rival offers either.

Where you can actually run it: Copilot and Devin Desktop win on IDE reach, Claude Code on surfaces

If your team is spread across editors, Devin Desktop's 40+ IDE plugins (VS Code, JetBrains, Vim, Xcode) is the broadest coverage here, with Copilot's five-IDE spread — VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Eclipse and Xcode — the strongest among the mainstream subscriptions. Cursor is the opposite bet: it's a fork you switch to, not an extension you add, so it reaches desktop, web, CLI, mobile and SDK but only inside Cursor. Antigravity is also a VS Code OSS fork, which at least makes the editor immediately familiar.

Claude Code wins a different axis: it reaches beyond the editor entirely, into web, iOS, Android, GitHub and Slack, which no other product here matches. Codex CLI is the narrowest by design — terminal only, and explicitly not an inline autocomplete tool, so it can't replace an editor assistant the way Copilot's unlimited completions do. Cline sits in the middle with VS Code, desktop, CLI and SDK, though its JetBrains support is reportedly Enterprise-tier only, a restriction Copilot and Devin Desktop don't impose.

Openness and control: Cline and Codex CLI are the only ones you can audit

Three products here are open source, and only two of them are still worth choosing on that basis. Cline (Apache-2.0, 69.5k GitHub stars) is the most genuinely vendor-neutral tool in the round-up: 12+ named providers plus any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and its Plan/Act split gives an explicit review step before anything changes — a safety affordance that Claude Code's autonomous multi-file editing and Cursor's Composer don't advertise. Codex CLI's openness is aimed elsewhere: being Rust and open source means you can audit the sandboxing and shell-access behaviour before trusting it, and its configurable approval modes are the closest rival to Cline's guardrails.

Gemini CLI is the cautionary tale. Apache 2.0 and a 1M-token window should make it a strong free pick, but consumer access ended, Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers were cut off and told to migrate, and its successor Antigravity CLI is reported as closed-source. That's how a 2.5 rating happens next to a 4.3. If you liked Gemini CLI's licence and context, Codex CLI is the direct replacement; if you liked its Google-ecosystem tie-in, Antigravity is where Google is pushing you — with the quota history noted above.

One more trade-off worth naming: Cline's output quality depends entirely on the model you pick and it can't compensate for a weak one, whereas Cursor hands you Claude Opus/Sonnet 4.7, GPT-5.5, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 4 in one editor so you can escalate mid-task. Devin Desktop splits the difference with its proprietary SWE-1.6 plus Claude/GPT/Gemini fallbacks and ACP support for plugging in outside agents such as Codex CLI.

Conclusion: which one should you buy?

Best overall — Cursor Composer 2.5 (4.5/5). It's the only tool here with published benchmark gains on hard multi-file work and a published per-task cost, and $0.07 per task buys a lot of forgiveness for the six-tier credit model. Avoid its Fast mode for unattended runs, though: roughly 6x the cost for about 30% less wall time is bad value.

Best value and best first paid subscription — GitHub Copilot. $10 with $15 of included credits, agent mode on every tier including Free, unlimited completions that never touch credits, and the widest mainstream IDE support. If you want one tool for both inline autocomplete and agent work, this is it — Codex CLI explicitly can't do the former.

Best for cost control and privacy-sensitive work — Cline. Free, Apache-2.0, model-agnostic down to local Ollama or LM Studio, with a Plan/Act review gate. Accept the API-key onboarding and the fact that your results are only as good as the model you point it at.

Best free terminal agent and best for huge repos — OpenAI Codex CLI. Up to 1M tokens of context, auditable Rust sandboxing, and no incremental cost on an existing ChatGPT plan. It's the natural migration target for stranded Gemini CLI users.

Best for whole-workflow coverage — Claude Code, if you can absorb the unquantified rate limits and the likelihood of paying $100 Max rather than $20. Nothing else reaches terminal, IDEs, desktop, web, mobile, GitHub and Slack at once.

Buy only for the specific feature: Antigravity if agent-driven front-end verification in a real Chrome instance is worth tolerating a rocky quota history, and Devin Desktop if its Agent Command Center and 40+ IDE plugins solve a multi-agent supervision problem you actually have — go in knowing there's no independent benchmark to back its performance claims. Skip Gemini CLI: the free tier is gone and the product has been superseded.