From Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and Google's new Antigravity CLI to China's Qwen 3.6, Kimi K2.6 and xAI's Grok Build — every major terminal agent compared on price, context, model, MCP support & more.
Every major CLI coding agent as of June 12, 2026 — including 2026 model bumps, pricing changes & new entrants.
Anthropic's flagship terminal agent. Now defaults to Claude Opus 4.8 (May 28, 2026) with dynamic workflows for large-scale tasks. June 15 billing restructure splits programmatic usage onto a separate credit pool. Safe Mode & plugin marketplace shipped in 2026.
OpenAI's open-source terminal agent. Now running GPT-5.5 (Apr 23) and GPT-5.3-Codex (Feb 5, Terminal-Bench 2.0 SOTA). Migrated to Rust (codex-rs, 95.6% of repo). /goal Goal Mode GA in v0.133 (May 21).
Announced at I/O 2026 (May 19) as the replacement for Gemini CLI — which is deprecated June 18, 2026 for free/individual users. Go rewrite, now closed-source (was Apache 2.0); community backlash after 6,000+ PRs locked out. Ships with Gemini 3.5 Flash.
Reached GA on Feb 25, 2026. Default model upgraded to Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Feb 17; Sonnet 4 deprecated May 6). /fleet parallel multi-agent shipped Apr 1. Microsoft's in-house Project Polaris replaces GPT-4 Turbo in August 2026.
AWS's developer CLI, deeply integrated with the AWS ecosystem. Free tier: 50 chat interactions/month. Now powered by Claude Sonnet 4. AWS is increasingly positioning Kiro as its agentic CLI flagship, while Q remains the AWS-infra workhorse.
Now GA (re:Invent Nov 2025) with permanent freemium tier. New Kiro Pro Max $100/mo tier (May 2026). May 12 shipped Parallel Task Execution + Requirements Analysis engine. Sonnet 4.6 / Opus 4.8 on paid plans. GovCloud + GitLab + TDD mode in 2026.
Alibaba's CLI agent — Gemini CLI fork now on Qwen 3.6 Plus (Apr) with 1M context, 78.8% SWE-bench Verified. Free 2,000 req/day tier ended Apr 15, 2026; switch to Bailian paid API or self-host. v0.18.0 added ACP mode + /skills.
Moonshot's open-source CLI agent. Kimi K2.6 reached GA Apr 21, 2026 — 1T MoE / 32B active, native multimodal (MoonViT), Agent Swarm of up to 300 sub-agents coordinating 4,000+ steps. Modified MIT license.
ByteDance's research agent + commercial TRAE CLI. MCP support added in 2026 (stdio, SSE, Streamable HTTP). TRAE SOLO rebranded to TRAE Work in June. Trajectory recording for audit. MIT license.
AI-native terminal — open-sourced May 7, 2026 under AGPL-3.0 (UI crates MIT) with OpenAI as founding sponsor. May 2026 release added Codex as harness for local child agents, drag-drop images, inline Mermaid + image rendering, and configurable max context. Cloud orchestration platform (Oz) remains proprietary.
xAI's terminal coding agent launched May 25, 2026 for SuperGrok + X Premium Plus subscribers. Plan mode, 8 parallel sub-agents in isolated git worktrees, headless CI mode, and Agent Client Protocol (ACP) support.
Open-source multi-model terminal UI that connects to 75+ providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Qwen, Kimi, and any local model via Ollama or LM Studio. Completely free when run against local models.
All 12 agents across key criteria — updated June 2026.
| Agent | SWE-bench | Context | Free Tier | Min. Price | MCP | Open Source | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🤖 Claude CodeAnthropic | 51.9% Pro | 1M | $5 credit | $20/mo | ✔ | ✔ | Best overall (Opus 4.8) |
| ⚡ Codex CLIOpenAI | 59.1% Pro | 400K | ✗ | $20/mo | ✔ | ✔ | GPT-5.5 ecosystem |
| 🔥 Qwen CodeAlibaba | 78.8% Ver. | 1M | Ended Apr 15 | BYOK | ✗ | ✔ | BYOK / self-host |
| 🌙 Kimi Code CLIMoonshot AI | 58.6% Pro | 300K sub-agents | Via plan | $20/mo | ✔ | ✔ | Value + multimodal |
| 🌟 Antigravity CLIGoogle | 43.3% Pro | 1M | 1000/day | $0 (EOL Jun 18) | ✔ | Closed | Deprecated soon |
| 🐙 Copilot CLIGitHub | ~70% | 200K | Limited | $10/mo | ✔ | ✗ | GitHub workflows |
| 🎯 Kiro CLIAWS | — | 200K+ | Preview | $100/mo Pro Max | ✔ | ✗ | Spec-driven dev |
| ☁️ Amazon Q CLIAWS | ~58% | 100K | 50 msg/mo | $0 | ✔ | ✗ | AWS (→ Kiro) |
| ⚙️ Trae AgentByteDance | ~55% | API-dep. | BYOK | $0 | MCP 2026 | ✔ | Privacy / audit |
| 🖥️ Warp CodeWarp | — | Configurable | Freemium | $0 | ✔ | AGPL-3.0 | Open terminal UX |
| 🛸 Grok BuildxAI | — | 2M | Via SuperGrok | $30/mo | ACP | ✗ | Parallel sub-agents |
| 🧩 OpenCodeopencode.ai | — | Model-dep. | Free (local) | $0 | ✔ | ✔ | Multi-provider TUI |
Pick the right agent for your use case.
Need the highest quality and widest ecosystem? Nothing beats Claude Code for autonomous tasks and SWE-bench scores.
→ Claude CodeWant a free powerful agent with no credit card? Antigravity CLI gives you 1M context and 1000 requests/day at $0.
→ Antigravity CLIWant near-Claude-Code performance for $20/mo with generous weekly quota? Kimi Code CLI at 76.8% SWE-bench is the value pick.
→ Kimi Code CLIWorking heavily with AWS, EC2, S3, IAM, or CloudFormation? Amazon Q CLI is purpose-built for this — nothing else comes close.
→ Amazon Q CLIUsing GitHub Issues, PRs, and Actions daily? Copilot CLI integrates natively and works on your existing $10/mo plan.
→ Copilot CLINeed a fully local agent with no vendor routing and full trajectory logs for audit compliance? Trae Agent is MIT-licensed and BYOK.
→ Trae AgentWant requirements → design → tasks before a single line of code is written? Kiro CLI's neurosymbolic spec approach is unique in this space.
→ Kiro CLIWant to use any OpenAI-compatible API with 2000 free runs/day and Apache 2.0 licensing? Qwen Code lets you bring your own key.
→ Qwen CodeAll data verified from official documentation and benchmarks.