Head to head
Gemini CLI vs Claude Code (2026): Claude Code vs Gemini CLI Pricing, Limits and Which Is Better
One of these two stopped serving individual users on June 18, 2026. Every price, license fee and limit below was read from Google's and Anthropic's own documentation in August 2026.
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The short answer
Almost every comparison of these two still says Gemini CLI is the free one. That stopped being true on June 18, 2026, when Google stopped serving Gemini CLI requests for free Gemini Code Assist users and for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, and pointed them at Antigravity CLI instead. Gemini CLI still runs, but only for organizations on a Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license or for anyone using a paid API key. That inverts the usual verdict: the cheapest supported way to run Gemini CLI today is $19 per user per month on an annual commitment, while Claude Code starts at $17 a month, so Claude Code is now the cheaper of the two at the entry rung as well as the one generally rated stronger on agentic coding. Gemini CLI keeps two real advantages: a 1M token context window and an Apache 2.0 license you can run against your own key.
Is Gemini CLI still available?
Not for individuals. On June 18, 2026 Google stopped serving Gemini CLI requests for free Gemini Code Assist users and for Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra subscribers. It still works for organizations holding a Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license, and for anyone calling it with a paid Gemini or Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform API key. The source code remains on GitHub under Apache 2.0.
Google announced this on May 19, 2026, framing it as consolidation rather than a shutdown. The reasoning it gave was that developers had outgrown a single-agent terminal loop and now wanted several agents working in parallel against a shared backend, which meant pouring the effort into one product instead of two. That product is Google Antigravity, and the terminal piece of it is Antigravity CLI: rebuilt in Go, asynchronous, sharing an agent harness with the desktop app. Google kept Agent Skills, Hooks, Subagents and Extensions, which became plugins, and said plainly there would not be full feature parity at launch.
The reason this matters to anyone comparing the two tools is simple. The received wisdom about Gemini CLI, repeated in nearly every article still ranking for this question, is that it is the free option and Claude Code is the paid one. Remove the free tier and that entire argument collapses. What is left is a paid Google product against a paid Anthropic product, and the comparison has to be redone on different ground.
If you are here because something broke
Requests stopped being served rather than the command being removed, so anything automated kept running and quietly stopped producing output. If you have a CI workflow, a cron job or a git hook that shells out to gemini while authenticated as an individual, it has been failing since June 18, 2026. Check that before you evaluate anything on this page, because a broken pipeline is a more urgent problem than a tool choice.
What is the difference between Gemini CLI and Claude Code?
Both are agents that live in your terminal, read your repository, edit files and run commands. The difference that decides the choice in 2026 is not capability, it is availability: one of them is sold to anyone with a credit card and the other is sold to organizations through Google Cloud.
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| Gemini CLI | Claude Code | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An open-source terminal agent (Apache 2.0) that put Gemini in your shell. Google has stopped developing it as a consumer product. | Anthropic's terminal agent, bundled into a Claude chat subscription rather than sold on its own. |
| Can an individual run it today | No. Free, Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra requests stopped being served on June 18, 2026. | Yes, on any paid Claude plan from Pro upward. |
| Who can still run it | Organizations on a Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license, and anyone using a paid Gemini or Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform API key. | Anyone on Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise. There is no license class that loses access. |
| Entry price to use it | $19 per user per month (Code Assist Standard, annual commitment), or $22.80 on a monthly commitment. | $17 per month (Claude Pro, annual) or $20 monthly. |
| Free tier | Withdrawn. It was 60 requests a minute and 1,000 a day on a personal Google account. | None. Claude's Free plan does not include Claude Code; the entitlement starts at Pro. |
| Successor product | Antigravity CLI, a closed-source Go binary sharing a harness with the Antigravity desktop app. | None. Claude Code is the current product and is actively developed. |
| Source code | Open, Apache 2.0, roughly 100,000 GitHub stars per Google's own announcement. | Closed source. |
| How you pay | A per-seat Google Cloud license, or consumption against an API key. | A flat subscription seat. Anthropic does not meter seat usage in dollars. |
Gemini CLI vs Claude Code pricing, tier by tier
This is the table the older comparisons cannot produce, because they still have a $0 row at the top of the Gemini column. Delete that row and the ranking flips: Claude Code is cheaper at the entry rung, on both an annual and a month-to-month commitment.
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| Tier | Gemini CLI | Claude Code | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Withdrawn June 18, 2026 | Not offered | Neither product has a free tier any more. This is the row that most comparisons still get wrong, and it is the row that changes the answer. |
| Entry, one developer | $19 / user / mo | $17 / mo | Gemini Code Assist Standard on an annual commitment against Claude Pro on an annual commitment. Claude is now the cheaper way in, by $2. |
| Entry, no commitment | $22.80 / user / mo | $20 / mo | Month to month on both sides. Claude stays cheaper, by $2.80. |
| Higher usage | $45 / user / mo | $100 / mo | Code Assist Enterprise (annual) is the only Gemini tier that raises the CLI's daily limits. Claude Max 5x is the equivalent step up and costs more than twice as much. |
| Heaviest tier | $54 / user / mo | $200 / mo | Enterprise on a monthly commitment against Claude Max 20x. Google has no rung above this for the CLI; Anthropic's ladder simply goes higher. |
| Team seat | $19 to $45 / seat | $20 / seat | Claude Team on an annual commitment sits between the two Google licenses. At Standard, Google is $1 cheaper a seat; at Enterprise it is $25 dearer. |
| Pay per use | API rates | API rates | Both allow bringing your own key and paying consumption. For Gemini this is now a first-class path rather than a fallback, because it survived the cutoff. |
Full tier detail for the Anthropic side is on our Claude Code pricing breakdown, and the wider field is on AI coding tool pricing. The Google side has its own page now: Gemini Code Assist pricing works through the license math seat by seat.
How much does Gemini CLI cost now?
Here is why nobody quotes a monthly price for Gemini CLI: Google does not publish one. The Cloud pricing page lists Gemini Code Assist by the hour, to nine decimal places, and leaves the arithmetic to you. Google's own convention is 730 hours to a month, and every one of the four figures below resolves to a clean number to the cent, which is a good sign the conversion is the intended one.
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| License | Commitment | Published rate | Per user / month | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Code Assist Standard | 12-month | $0.026027397 | $19.00 | The cheapest legitimate way to keep running Gemini CLI today. |
| Code Assist Standard | Monthly | $0.031232877 | $22.80 | The no-commitment price. A 20% premium for the flexibility. |
| Code Assist Enterprise | 12-month | $0.061643836 | $45.00 | The only tier Google says carries increased daily usage limits for the CLI. |
| Code Assist Enterprise | Monthly | $0.073972603 | $54.00 | Same 20% premium for month-to-month billing. |
Two things fall out of this table. The first is the headline: a Gemini CLI seat now costs $19 a month at its cheapest, which is $2 more than Claude Pro at $17. The tool that everyone remembers as free is the dearer of the pair. The second is quieter and matters more to a finance team: the gap between an annual commitment and month-to-month billing is exactly 20% on both editions, so the flexibility to cancel has a fixed, knowable price rather than a negotiated one.
One caveat worth stating plainly, because it cuts against the neatness of the table. Google publishes an exact fee per seat and no request quota for that seat. It says only that Enterprise edition carries increased daily usage limits for agent mode and the Gemini CLI. How much higher is not published anywhere. So you can forecast the invoice to the cent and still not know what you have bought.
Gemini CLI vs Claude Code usage limits
The old Gemini CLI number is the one everyone still quotes: 60 requests a minute and 1,000 a day on a personal Google account. It was a genuinely generous allowance and it is worth being clear that it no longer exists for anybody. Nothing replaced it with a published figure. Today Google gates Gemini CLI by license class, tells you Enterprise gets more, and stops there.
Anthropic gates Claude Code by time instead of by count. A plan buys you a rolling window plus a weekly cap, and usage inside your seat allowance is explicitly not metered in dollars. That is a different kind of uncertainty: you know you will not get a surprise bill, and you do not know exactly when you will be told to come back later. Where Anthropic is unusually forthcoming is on observed cost. Its own documentation puts real Claude Code consumption at roughly $13 per developer per active day and $150 to $250 per developer per month, with 90% of users staying under $30 on an active day. No equivalent figure exists on the Google side.
Put those together and the honest summary is that neither vendor gives you a complete picture, but they withhold opposite halves of it. Google publishes the price and hides the quota. Anthropic publishes the consumption and hides the meter. If you want the Anthropic side taken apart properly, we did that in how Claude Code usage limits work and compared it against OpenAI's approach in Codex vs Claude Code usage limits.
What replaced Gemini CLI?
Antigravity CLI, the terminal surface of Google Antigravity. It is a closed-source Go binary rather than an open-source Node package, it runs agents asynchronously so a long refactor does not lock up your session, and it shares an agent harness with the Antigravity desktop application, which means improvements to the core agents arrive everywhere at once. For anyone who used Gemini CLI to get grounded answers, scaffold a project or drive cloud infrastructure, Google's position is that all of that still works.
It is free on the Individual plan, which reads like the old arrangement returning. It is not quite the same offer. Google's pricing page describes that tier's allowance only as basic weekly rate limits, and publishes no number for it anywhere we could find. That is a meaningful downgrade in one specific respect: the thing that made the old Gemini CLI free tier usable in a team setting was that 1,000 a day was a figure you could plan around. An unstated weekly limit is not.
We went through the whole Antigravity lineup, tier by tier, including what the free plan actually gets you and where the model access inverts at the enterprise level, on our Google Antigravity page. If you are choosing between Google's new stack and the rest of the field, best AI for coding is the wider comparison.
What actually decides which one you should run
Sticker price settles less of this than it looks. These six mechanics are where the real difference lives, and most of them are documented somewhere other than a pricing page.
The cutoff hit automation hardest, not people
A developer who lost Gemini CLI noticed within a minute and moved on. A CI pipeline that shelled out to the gemini command did not: it kept running, kept exiting, and stopped producing output. If you inherited a repository with Gemini CLI in a workflow file, that step has been failing or silently doing nothing since June 18, 2026. Grep your CI config before you compare anything on this page.
Google rations by license class, Anthropic by time
Every Gemini CLI limit now depends on which license your organization bought, and Google states that increased daily usage limits are an Enterprise edition feature. Claude works the other way: the plan sets the size of a rolling window and a weekly cap, and Anthropic is explicit that usage inside a seat allowance is not metered in dollars. One asks your procurement team a question, the other asks your calendar.
Only one of them still publishes a number you can budget against
Google's Cloud pricing page gives an exact per-hour license fee, so a Gemini CLI seat is forecastable to the cent. What it does not give is a request quota for that seat. Anthropic gives the opposite: no dollar meter, but its own documentation puts observed Claude Code consumption at about $13 per developer per active day and $150 to $250 per developer per month. Between them you can build a budget. Neither alone is enough.
The open-source argument survived the product
Gemini CLI is Apache 2.0 and the code is still on GitHub, so nothing stops you running it against a paid API key of your own. That is a genuine advantage Claude Code does not have, and it is the reason the answer here is not simply "Gemini CLI is dead". What died is the managed consumer tier, not the binary.
The successor is free but unbudgetable
Antigravity CLI costs nothing on the Individual plan, which sounds like the old Gemini CLI deal returning. It is not the same offer. Google's own pricing page describes that tier only as "Basic weekly rate limits" and publishes no figure anywhere. You can run it for free; you cannot promise anyone how much of it you will get.
Neither one opens the pull request
Both tools are things you sit in front of. You type, they work, you watch, you commit. That is the shared shape, and it is why the choice between them matters less than teams expect: whichever you pick, a human still has to be at the terminal for the work to happen.
Gemini CLI vs Claude Code: which one is better for your situation?
Asked in general, the question has stopped having a clean answer, because the two are no longer sold to the same buyer. Asked specifically, it has eight.
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| If this is you | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You are one developer who wants a terminal agent today | Claude Code | It is $17 a month annual, it works the moment you pay, and there is no license class to negotiate. |
| Your company already buys Gemini Code Assist | Gemini CLI | You already own it. Standard and Enterprise both include the CLI and neither was affected by the cutoff. |
| You want the biggest context window | Gemini CLI | A 1M token window is still its strongest technical claim, and it is genuinely useful on large repositories. |
| You want the strongest agentic coding quality | Claude Code | This is the consistent finding across independent comparisons, and it is why Anthropic can charge more. |
| You need it inside CI or a script | Either, with care | Gemini CLI needs a paid API key or a Code Assist license. Claude Code needs a seat or an API key. Neither is free to automate. |
| You are on Google Cloud and want one invoice | Gemini CLI | It bills through your existing Cloud account, and the Enterprise edition raises the CLI's daily limits. |
| You must run the agent on your own infrastructure | Gemini CLI | It is Apache 2.0. You can run the binary against your own key and nobody can withdraw it from you. |
| You want finished pull requests rather than a session | Neither | Both are interactive tools you drive. See the section below for the honest version of this answer. |
Weighing a wider field than this pair? Codex vs Claude Code, GitHub Copilot vs Claude Code, Cursor vs Claude Code and Windsurf vs Cursor take the other pairs in this bracket, and Claude Code alternatives covers what else is out there.
What both of them leave to you
Gemini CLI and Claude Code are both good tools, and they are both tools you sit in front of. You open a terminal, you type, you steer, you watch, you commit. That shared shape is why this whole comparison is narrower than it looks: whichever you choose, the work happens while a developer is present and paying attention, and it stops when they close the laptop.
Agentcode is built for the other half of the day rather than to replace either one. You describe a task, it plans, edits the files, runs your test suite, and opens a reviewable pull request on the GitHub or GitLab repository you already have. It never merges on its own. The bill is $29 a month, flat: no license class to negotiate, no weekly window to wait out, and no vendor decision that can withdraw your tier at 60 days notice.
Where they genuinely beat us: Gemini CLI's 1M token context window is larger than anything we offer, and being Apache 2.0 means nobody can ever take it away from you, which after June 18, 2026 is not an abstract argument. Claude Code's interactive loop is a better tool than we are for exploratory work where you want to see every step before it happens. If you want a model at your fingertips while you think, buy one of them. If you want finished work arriving as pull requests you can review, on GitLab as well as GitHub, at a price you can forecast a year out, that is the case for us.
Gemini CLI vs Claude Code: your questions answered
Is Gemini CLI still available?
Not for individuals. On June 18, 2026 Google stopped serving Gemini CLI requests for free Gemini Code Assist users and for Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra subscribers. It still works for organizations holding a Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license, and for anyone calling it with a paid Gemini or Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform API key. The code itself remains on GitHub under Apache 2.0.
Is Gemini CLI free?
It was, and it is not any more. The old deal was 60 requests a minute and 1,000 a day on a personal Google account, and that tier stopped being served on June 18, 2026. The cheapest supported way to run Gemini CLI today is a Gemini Code Assist Standard license at $19 per user per month on an annual commitment. Google's free successor is Antigravity CLI, which is a different product.
Which is better, Gemini CLI or Claude Code?
For an individual developer in 2026, Claude Code, because Gemini CLI is no longer sold to individuals at all. For an organization already licensed for Gemini Code Assist, Gemini CLI is effectively free at the margin and worth using. Claude Code is generally rated stronger on agentic coding quality; Gemini CLI holds the larger context window and an open-source license.
How much does Gemini CLI cost now?
Google publishes the license fee by the hour rather than the month. Gemini Code Assist Standard is $0.026027397 per hour on a 12-month commitment, which is exactly $19.00 per user per month, or $22.80 month to month. Enterprise, the only edition Google says raises the CLI's daily usage limits, is $45.00 per user per month annual and $54.00 monthly.
What replaced Gemini CLI?
Antigravity CLI, part of Google Antigravity. Google rebuilt it in Go for speed, made it asynchronous so it can orchestrate several agents in the background, and gave it the same agent harness as the Antigravity desktop app. It kept Agent Skills, Hooks, Subagents and Extensions, now called plugins, but Google said openly there would not be full feature parity at launch.
Is Claude Code free?
No. Claude's Free plan does not include Claude Code; the entitlement begins on Pro at $17 per month with an annual subscription or $20 billed monthly. Above that, Max is $100 for roughly five times the Pro allowance and $200 for roughly twenty times. So neither tool in this comparison has a free tier in 2026.
Can I still use Gemini CLI with an API key?
Yes, and this is the path that survived the cutoff intact. Google's announcement states that Gemini CLI remains accessible via paid Gemini and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform API keys. Set GEMINI_API_KEY from AI Studio, or authenticate through Vertex AI with a Google Cloud project, and you pay consumption rates instead of a seat fee.
Did the Gemini CLI shutdown break CI pipelines?
For anyone whose pipeline authenticated as an individual, yes. Requests stopped being served rather than the command disappearing, so workflow steps kept executing and stopped returning useful output. Gemini Code Assist for GitHub was included in the change: no new organization installations from June 18, 2026, with requests ceasing in the weeks after.
Is Gemini CLI better than Claude Code for large codebases?
Its 1M token context window is the strongest argument for it, and on a genuinely large repository that matters. The counterweight is token efficiency: independent comparisons have repeatedly found Gemini CLI consuming more input tokens than Claude Code for the same task, so a bigger window does not automatically mean a cheaper or faster run.
Should I migrate from Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI or to Claude Code?
If you liked Gemini CLI because it was free, Antigravity CLI is the closest replacement, but Google publishes no quota figure for its free tier so you cannot budget it. If you liked it because it was a capable terminal agent and you are willing to pay, Claude Code at $17 a month is the shorter path. If your company holds a Code Assist license, you do not have to migrate at all.
Last updated: August 2026
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Full pricing breakdowns for each tool: Claude Code pricing, GitHub Copilot pricing, Cursor pricing and Google Antigravity.
Or read what Gemini Code Assist costs per seat, how Claude Code usage limits work, or step back to AI coding tool pricing across every tool and what an AI coding agent actually does.
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