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Tim Zinin
Tim Zinin

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CLI Coding Agents Comparison 2026: 8 Tools Benchmarked

!CLI Agents Cover

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:

  1. Claude Code — 80.8% — $200/mo
  2. MiniMax M2.5 — 80.2% — $10/mo
  3. GLM-5 — 77.8% — $6/mo
  4. Gemini CLI — 76.2% — free
  5. 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.

Full interactive comparison with details

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