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Pick two to five tools. Every cell comes from a verified record; anything unverified says so. There is no overall winner — the right choice depends on your task, budget and technical needs.

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Criterion	Claude Code	OpenAI Codex	GitHub Copilot	Cursor	Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf)
Provider	Anthropic	OpenAI	GitHub	Anysphere (part of SpaceX since August 2026)	Cognition
What it is for	Anthropic's agentic coding tool that reads your codebase, edits files and runs commands from the terminal, IDE, desktop or browser.	OpenAI's coding agent, included with ChatGPT plans and usable with an API key.	An AI pair programmer and coding agent that works in your editor, terminal and on GitHub itself.	An AI-first code editor with local and cloud agents, now sold on a shared Cursor and Grok subscription.	The renamed Windsurf editor, rebuilt around managing local and cloud coding agents.
Latest confirmed model	Claude Opus 5.5 Sep 22, 2026	GPT-6.1 Sol Sep 29, 2026	—	Grok 4.7 Sep 21, 2026	SWE-2 Sep 10, 2026
Main capabilities	Terminal CLI IDE extensions Desktop and web (Depends on plan) MCP, skills and hooks Routines and scheduled tasks GitHub Actions / GitLab CI and code review	Codex CLI and IDE extension Cloud tasks (Depends on plan) Desktop app (Limited) Fast and Ultrafast modes (Depends on plan) Extra credits (Depends on plan)	Inline suggestions Agent mode in IDEs Copilot CLI Cloud agent (Depends on plan) Code review (Depends on plan) Third-party agent delegation (Preview)	Agent and Chat Cloud agents and automations (Depends on plan) AI code reviews and code hosting (Depends on plan) Third-party models (Depends on plan) Projects Rollouts and Security Review bots	Tab completions and inline edits Agent Command Center Devin Cloud (Depends on plan) SWE-2 model (Depends on plan) DeepWiki and Ask Devin (Depends on plan) Fusion harness
Free plan	No	Yes Quick coding tasks	Yes 2,000 inline suggestions per month; 50 chat requests; limited chat and agent usage	Yes Limited AI usage; limited agent and Chat requests	Yes Light agent quota; unlimited Tab completions and inline edits
Cheapest paid plan	Pro: $20/mo $17/mo billed annually Annual billing is $200 up front	Go: $8/mo	Pro: $10/mo	Plus: $8/mo	Pro: $20/mo
API access	Yes · docs (opens in a new tab)	Yes · docs (opens in a new tab)	No · docs (opens in a new tab)	Limited · docs (opens in a new tab)	Limited
Learning curve	Some experience helps	Some experience helps	Beginner-friendly	Some experience helps	Some experience helps
Last verified	Oct 19, 2026	Oct 19, 2026	Oct 19, 2026	Oct 19, 2026	Oct 19, 2026

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Ready-made comparisons

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