codex cli vs claude code vs openai

2 weeks ago - Codex CLI for autonomous tasks, DevOps, and cost-sensitive workflows. March 2026 — Terminal-based AI coding agents have become the default tool for serious developers. The two dominant players — Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex CLI — both operate from the command line, both handle multi-file edits autonomously, and both promise to transform how you write software.

Zenvanriel

zenvanriel.com › ai-engineer-blog › claude-code-vs-openai-codex-cli-comparison

Claude Code vs OpenAI Codex Mastery-Driven CLI Comparison

2 days ago - Claude Code treats every request like a collaboration. The CLI encourages context-rich prompts, retrieval of multiple files, and incremental improvements. It often asks clarifying questions before executing a change, keeping you in the loop ...

Discussions

Codex CLI vs Claude Code (adding features to a 500k codebase)

Former Claude Code user for a few months on Max 20x, fairly heavy user too. Loved it at the time, but feels like at least during part of last month the quality of the model responses degraded. I found myself having to regularly steer Claude into not making changes I didn't actually agree on (yes I use the plan mode, it's highly valuable). Claude also often told me that code was production ready when it wasn't, it either failed to compile or had some kind of flaw that needed addressing. Found out about a $1 Teams plan offer for ChatGPT so figured it would be a great opportunity to check out Codex CLI and GPT_5. Suffice to say it impressed me. I tell it what I want, it just does that. Most tasks I've thrown at it are usually completed and successful in one or two shots. If I'm possibly wrong or there's a reason to debate something first then it usually does so, while Claude would've often said "you're absolutely right, ..." - blindly agreeing with me regardless. GPT-5 also makes far less assumptions compared to Claude, regularly replying with open questions if it has any. After it completes a task GPT_5 will usually follow up with an idea or suggestion related to what we had done, which I also found useful. The biggest challenge I've given it so far was to refactor a long overdue and messy .cs file that contained about 3k LOC. I've tried this with various other AI LLMs, including Claude Code (which couldn't read the entire file as it was over 25k tokens), but they just ultimately make bugs and mess things up when trying to do so. I didn't think GPT-5 would be any different, but my god, it surprised me again. I planned with it, did it in small bits and pieces at a time, and a day or so later I'm now down to around 1k LOC for that file. It seems to be working fine too. I've been using Claude primarily since Sonnet 3.5, and GPT models before Sonnet 3.5, but it looks like I'm back with OpenAI again unless Anthropic "wow" me back. For Codex CLI, I would recommend checking out the "just-every/code" fork. Much nicer UI, /plan, /solve, /code commands, multiple themes, integrated browser capability, can resume previous conversations. More on reddit.com

r/ChatGPTCoding

75

102

September 5, 2025

Codex Vs Claude code

From the perspective of using the pure model, I think GPT5 has fully reached the level of sonnet4, and in some cases even surpasses it. As for Codex, I’ve tried both Codex CLI and Codex in VS Code. They already have a certain degree of usability, but indeed lack quite a few features, and the gap with Claude Code is still significant. Moreover, I don’t understand why Codex’s MCP doesn’t adopt the common approach. More on reddit.com

r/ClaudeCode

80

41

August 30, 2025

Which CLI AI coding tool to use right now? Codex CLI vs. Claude Caude vs. sth else?

Codex CLI all the way. It's not exactly clear whether GPT-5-Codex-medium and GPT-5-Codex-high actually perform better than Sonnet and Opus yet, the benchmarks aren't in. If history is any guide, Claude is probably marginally better (like we're talking within a few percentage points on the SWE Rebench – say Codex does 46%, Claude might do 48%) but on the flipside, Claude is many, many times more expensive than Codex CLI. That is to say the subscription costs the same, but you will be rate limited far more often by Claude, effectively getting fewer prompts out of your subscription in a given month. Also, I believe GPT-5-Codex currently benchmarks far above the competition if we restrict the benchmarks only to agentic coding (i.e. vibecoding without a human also writing code) instead of a broader spectrum of pair programming, code completions, etc. Some would argue Claude designs better frontends, which I suppose can in some ways be considered true, but the downside is that you're getting generic frontend #1928482. You should always consider design as an involved process, even with AI, because they crucially have neither eyes nor human aesthetic sensibilities. An AI does not care if a design is not visually cohesive if it looks correct in the CSS. So to address your questions by number: They're almost exactly equal in capability. Claude is (probably, we don't know with the new Codex model yet) a tiny bit better, but the downside is you're getting much less bang for your buck for that marginal improvement. An improvement you're honestly unlikely to notice anyway. Neither provider currently numerically lists their rate limits, they seem to be based a lot on traffic and demand. I.e. you'll get more usage during low traffic hours than during a surge. What is absolutely undeniable, however, is that Codex CLI currently offers the highest quota of the two. By Anthropic's own math, you get about 45 requests per 5 hours on the Pro plan on the high end (short conversations, simple requests, low demand), whereas on the comparable Codex CLI Plus you get anywhere from 50 to 150 in that same timespan for actually demanding requests. I don't know what the limits are for the Max versions, but I assume there's some kind of logical scaling up, so presumably Codex would still be far cheaper if measured by subscriptionCost / MaxPossibleRequestsPerMonth. Though use case will ultimately determine whether that difference ends up mattering to you. I use Github Copilot for a lot of work stuff, but in my free time I use ChatGPT Plus (not even Max) and I have never, not once, been rate limited in the Codex CLI despite throwing some very heavy shit at it. You could stay in an IDE if you wanted to. There's both a Claude and a Codex extension for VSCode. What I do is honestly just code in the terminal for the most part, while I run my server in a separate terminal tab, and then I just refresh (or hot-reload) the localhost server in my browser and see the software progress as I go. This is, of course, not possible if you're doing split backend and frontend development (which can often be helpful), but then you could, for example, surface a very barebones skeleton UI just to test the backend functionality and replace it with a frontend once you're sure the backend works. If you really want a completely visual editor (Lovable-style, code well hidden), I would strongly suggest you don't, of course, but it is possible to do in a better way. As of yesterday, Convex just made Chef (Lovable but better and made by a reputable company prioritizing security above all else) open source and self-hostable. So that's an option now. Strongly advise against this route because you will learn nothing at all, but if you must, go with Chef above the competition. Bringing your own API key is much cheaper anyway. No. Go with Codex CLI. If you want to cut costs, you could go with an open-source or free (with data sharing) model (open source examples could be Kimi or GLM 4.5, while free proprietary models could be something like Sonoma Sky Alpha or Deepseek 3.1. Keep in mind unless you self-host these, you will 100% be data-sharing, because that's the only reason you're getting the free compute power). You can access those through OpenRouter, but to avoid rate limiting you have to top up a minimum of $11 worth of credits in your OpenRouter wallet (won't be spent, it's probably an anti-abuse guard). More on reddit.com

r/vibecoding

24

12

September 19, 2025

A few thoughts on Codex CLI vs. Claude Code

I’m starting to really like Codex CLI w GPT-5. It took me some time to get the settings right but now it’s working quite well. Claude can go off the rails easily and often and also be lazy and cheat. But GPT-5 seems to be well balanced and not go too crazy in either direction. I wish there was a $100 plan like Claude. More on reddit.com

r/ClaudeAI

128

196

August 18, 2025

Videos