CLI Coding Agents Comparison 2026: 8 Tools Benchmarked
# ai# coding# cli# productivity
Tim Zinin!CLI Agents Cover You have heard of Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI assistants. But the most powerful...
You have heard of Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI assistants. But the most powerful way to use them is the version living in your terminal — a CLI agent.
It sees your entire project, reads/edits files, runs commands, commits to git. You describe a task — it does it.
I compared 8 CLI coding agents:
- Claude Code — 80.8% — $200/mo
- MiniMax M2.5 — 80.2% — $10/mo
- GLM-5 — 77.8% — $6/mo
- Gemini CLI — 76.2% — free
- GPT-5.3 Codex — 75.4% — $200/mo
Key Findings
| Tool | SWE-bench Score | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 80.8% | $200/mo |
| MiniMax M2.5 | 80.2% | $10/mo |
| GLM-5 | 77.8% | $6/mo |
| Gemini CLI | 76.2% | Free |
| GPT-5.3 Codex | 75.4% | $200/mo |
| Kimi K2.5 | 69.9% | $16/mo |
The sweet spot? MiniMax M2.5 at $10/month delivers 99.3% of Claude Code quality at 5% of the cost.