Grok Build alternatives in 2026: 7 coding agents and apps to use instead

Disclosure: Enjoy is our product, and it runs Grok Build beside most of the agents below. We checked every price, score and limit against each maker’s own pages, and Artificial Analysis’s, on November 12, 2026, and we say where another app is the better pick, Grok Build included.

Grok Build alternatives compared

Grok Build is SpaceXSI’s coding agent for the terminal, “now powered by Grok 4.7,” on the same subscription as Grok, Cursor and X. These are the agents and apps people weigh against it, side by side, whether what you want is better results, a pool that isn’t shared with everything else you use, or another lab’s models.

App	Best for	Price, checked November 12, 2026	Runs on	Coding Agent Index, best setup
Grok Build	People who already pay for Grok or X	Free, limited; Plus $8 a month; Premium $30; Super $100; Ultra $200	Mac, Windows, Linux	47, with Grok 4.7
Claude Code	The hardest work	Claude Pro $20 a month, or $17 billed yearly; Max $100; Ultra $200	Mac, Windows, Linux	62, with Opus 5.5
Muse Code	The cheapest plan that outscores Grok Build	Everyday $5; High $15; Power $50; Maximum $200	Mac, Windows, Linux	52 with Muse Wonder, on every plan; 59 with Muse Wonder Full, from Power
Antigravity CLI	Gemini, with a free start	Free; Google AI Pro $19.99; Ultra from $99.99	Mac, Windows, Linux	53 with Gemini 4 Argon, from Pro; 59 with Gemini 4 Carbon, on Ultra
Codex	The lowest cost per task, and a free start	Free and Go ($8) with GPT-6 Luna in the desktop app; Plus $20; Pro $100, $200 or $500	Mac, Windows, Linux	54 with GPT-6.1 Sol, from Plus
OpenCode	Any model, free and open source	Free; Go $10; Go Plus $40; or your own providers	Mac, Windows, Linux	49, with GLM-5.3, the one model tested
Cursor	An editor on the subscription you already pay for	Included from Free; Plus $8, Grok models only; Premium $30	Mac, Windows, Linux	Not on the index
Enjoy	Grok Build and the others in one conversation	A monthly subscription, free for 7 days, with your phone and one computer (pricing)	Mac, Windows, Linux	The score of the agent you pick

Prices are each company’s US list prices per month, before tax. Enjoy runs Grok Build, Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Muse Code and OpenCode on your own plans, which their companies bill for separately. The scores come from Artificial Analysis’s Coding Agent Index, which runs each agent and model together on FrontierCode, Terminal-Bench and SWE-Atlas tasks, as its pages stood on November 12.

Why people look for a Grok Build alternative

Grok Build is a capable agent, with a plan mode, skills, plugins, hooks and MCP servers, and it’s open source. Three things send people looking, each in the words of its maker or of Artificial Analysis:

• It trails on the index. “Grok Build with Grok 4.7 (Xhigh) scores 47 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, placing it below average among coding agents (median: 49),” says its page, which also calls it “particularly expensive,” at $9.48 of API usage per task against a median of $5.41. Its gap is widest on Terminal-Bench, where it scores 33 to Claude Code’s 63, per the comparison. On a plan, tasks draw on your weekly pool instead of costing that, and Grok Build’s averaged 15.9 million tokens each, against Codex’s 3.2 million.
• One pool for everything. Paid Grok plans have “one shared weekly usage pool that you can spend however you like across any Grok product,” says Grok’s help, whose usage view splits it by “API, Build, Chat, Imagine, Voice.” On The X Subscription, “Grok Chat, Imagine, Voice, Grok Bot, and Cursor all draw from the same weekly pool,” per Cursor’s models page. A week of Grok Bot or image generation leaves less for coding. On November 1, many Grok Bot users saw their week jump to 100%, as our memo explains.
• Other labs’ models cost extra. Grok Build “supports any custom model,” its docs say, but with that provider’s API key, billed per token. In Cursor, Plus says “Only Grok models are available on this plan,” and on Premium and up, Cursor’s help says other labs’ models are “billed at API list prices from the first use.”

One name covers two products. SpaceXSI also calls the app builder in the Grok chat “Grok Build on web and mobile”: “Describe an app, a game, a website, or a dashboard in Grok, and Grok builds a working version live in your chat,” and “Every app you publish gets its own address on grok.me.” If that’s the Grok Build you’re leaving, after the exposed grok.me apps or otherwise, our Lovable alternatives guide compares app builders. This guide is about the terminal agent.

Claude Code

Best for: the hardest work, when results matter more than cost.

Claude Code is Anthropic’s coding agent, in the terminal, in Anthropic’s desktop app and in editors, on macOS 13 or later, Windows 10 and Linux, per its setup guide. With Opus 5.5 it has the top score on the index, 62, against Grok Build’s 47, and it leads on all three benchmarks in the comparison. When a limit stops a task, “Claude Code waits in the open session and continues the task on its own after the limit resets.”

Price: Claude’s pricing marks Pro, Max and Ultra “Claude Code included.” Pro is $17 a month billed yearly, “$20 if billed monthly.” Max, at $100, has “5x Pro usage,” and Ultra, at $200, “10x Pro usage every week” and no five-hour limit for verified accounts. The free plan leaves Claude Code out.

Watch for: it costs more per task on the index than Grok Build, $11.42 to $9.48, and takes longer, an hour a task to Grok Build’s 36 minutes. Anthropic publishes multiples, not counts: “How fast you reach a limit depends on the model you use, how long your chats are, and how large your files are.” And Claude Code isn’t open source: its license reads “© Anthropic PBC. All rights reserved.”

Muse Code

Best for: the cheapest plan that outscores Grok Build.

Muse Code is Meta’s coding agent, “Multi-agent by default,” says its page, and its docs say it “runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows from one codebase.” Muse Wonder is on every plan, and with it Muse Code scores 52 on the index. Muse Wonder Full, on Power and Maximum, scores 59, above Grok Build on all three benchmarks, per the comparison.

Price: Everyday Usage is $5 a month, with “10-50 prompts every 5 hours.” High Usage is $15 for “5x more usage,” Power $50 for 20 times, and Maximum $200 for 80 times. Without a subscription, it bills per token on a Meta API key.

Watch for: Meta trains on your work unless you say no. “Muse Code subscriptions default to Contributor mode,” its subscriptions page says, where “you get more usage from your plan in exchange for letting Meta use your content to train future Meta models.” Turn it off in /settings, on each computer. Past a limit, Meta lists two ways on, a bigger plan or the wait, and “If you are on the Maximum Usage plan, you must wait for your limit to refresh.” On Windows, “Voice input is unavailable.”

Antigravity CLI

Best for: Gemini, with a free start.

Antigravity CLI, run as agy, is “the terminal-first surface to interact with Antigravity agents,” and its README installs it with one command on macOS, Linux and Windows. It can hand background work to “concurrent agent sessions.” On the index, it scores 53 with Gemini 4 Argon and 59 with Gemini 4 Carbon, per the comparison, at $7.74 a task with Carbon.

Price: free, with “Basic weekly rate limits,” on Antigravity’s pricing. Google AI Pro is $19.99 a month and Ultra from $99.99, on Google’s plans page, where Pro lists “Expanded rate limits and access to Gemini 4 Argon” in Antigravity and only Ultra lists Gemini 4 Carbon.

Watch for: free accounts get “A meaningful quota, refreshed weekly” on Gemini 3.8 Flash, not the models that set those scores. Its plans page says “There is currently no support for” “Bring-your-own-key (BYOK) or bring-your-own-endpoint for additional rate limits,” and “Usage limits for this service are subject to modification.”

Codex

Best for: the lowest cost per task among the agents that beat Grok Build, and a free start.

Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent, in the ChatGPT desktop app for “macOS, Windows, or Linux,” a CLI, an editor extension and the cloud. With GPT-6.1 Sol it scores 54 for $1.50 a task, about a sixth of Grok Build’s cost for seven points more, per the comparison. The Codex CLI is open source under Apache 2.0, like Grok Build.

Price: Codex’s pricing gives Free and Go, which is $8 a month, “GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app, subject to rollout.” Plus, at $20, adds “Codex on the web, in the CLI, in the IDE extension, and on iOS” with GPT-6.1 Sol, and Pro is $100, $200 or $500.

Watch for: GPT-6 Luna, the free plans’ model, scores 31 on the index. On Plus, OpenAI estimates 15 to 160 local messages every five hours with GPT-6.1 Sol, but “These estimates are not fixed message limits,” and “Local messages and cloud chats share your plan’s usage allowance. Weekly limits may also apply.” Its import takes your setup from “Claude Code, Claude Cowork, or Cursor,” not Grok Build.

OpenCode

Best for: any model, including Grok’s, in a free, open-source agent.

OpenCode calls itself “the open source coding agent for any model”: “Start with free models or bring any of 200+ providers.” It’s under the MIT license on GitHub, with a desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux, a terminal interface and a phone app. You can “Log in with ChatGPT Plus or Pro or GitHub Copilot,” and xAI is among its providers, so you can keep Grok on an API key while you try others.

Price: free, with its free models, a model on your own computer, or your own subscriptions and keys. OpenCode Go, its own model plan, is $10 a month, and Go Plus $40.

Watch for: the free models are free “for a limited time,” several say “The team is using this time to collect feedback and improve the model,” and one says “Its provider retains your data and may use it for model training.” The index tested it with one model, GLM-5.3, which scores 49 and is “notably slow,” at 56 minutes a task, per its page.

Cursor

Best for: an editor with an agent built in, on the subscription you already pay for.

“The X Subscription is one subscription that brings Grok, Cursor, and X together,” says Cursor’s help, and “The Cursor desktop app is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux,” per its downloads. If you pay for Grok, you already have it, with its Agent in the editor and a CLI, and cloud agents from Premium.

Price: included in every plan, per Cursor’s pricing: Free, with limited usage, Plus at $8, Premium at $30, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200.

Watch for: it doesn’t get you out of the pool: “Grok and Cursor usage draw from the same included pool.” On Plus, “Only Grok models are available on this plan.” Other labs’ models, from Premium, are “billed at API list prices from the first use and paid from your prepaid credit,” and whether OpenAI keeps supplying GPT models to Cursor is still unsettled. Its agent isn’t on the index.

Enjoy

Best for: keeping Grok Build and adding the others, in one conversation, so you don’t have to choose.

Enjoy is a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux that installs Grok Build and signs it in to your Grok or X account, beside Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Muse Code and local models through OpenCode, each on the plan you already have. What it adds:

• Switch agents mid-conversation. Start with Grok Build, and when its answer isn’t good enough, or its week runs out, hand the task to Claude Code or Codex. “The new agent gets the conversation so far, including replies from other agents, before it works on your message.”
• Keep going through limits. When an agent runs out of usage, Enjoy moves to another of your accounts that still has usage, or waits for the limit to reset, then continues.
• One message box. Every agent’s effort levels and permission modes are in the same menu, and Grok Build’s weekly usage shows as one bar with when it resets.
• More than code. JOY keeps an eye on all your projects, and workflows can run on a schedule.

Price: Enjoy is one monthly subscription, and the first seven days are free, with a card to start. It includes your phone and any browser and one computer; each other computer is $9.99 a month, and each teammate you invite needs a subscription of their own. See pricing.

Watch for: Enjoy isn’t open source, and it’s a monthly subscription on top of your AI plans once the free week ends. It doesn’t change Grok’s pool or add other labs’ models to your Grok account: each agent runs on its own company’s plan. Grok Build “doesn’t tell Enjoy which account is which,” so its accounts are numbered, and a message you send while it’s working “waits until the current work ends.” Enjoy imports past Claude Code and Codex conversations, not Grok Build’s. Scheduled workflows run only while your computer is awake with Enjoy open.

Taking your setup with you

Leaving Grok Build costs less than most switches, because it already reads other agents’ files. Its project rules page says it reads “any of AGENTS.md, Agents.md, AGENT.md, CLAUDE.md, Claude.md, and CLAUDE.local.md,” and .claude/rules/ and .cursor/rules/ “for compatibility.” So whatever you wrote for Grok Build is probably already in a file the next agent reads:

1. Codex “reads AGENTS.md files before doing any work,” per its docs.
2. Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md, and “can also read a repository’s AGENTS.md files in place of CLAUDE.md” when there’s no CLAUDE.md.
3. A conversation doesn’t move on its own. grok export <session-id> [output] will “Export a session transcript as Markdown,” which you can hand to the next agent as a file. The road back is shorter: grok import will “Import sessions from Claude Code.”

When to stay with Grok Build

If you already pay for Grok or X, Grok Build is part of what you bought. Plus, at $8 a month, includes “Grok Chat, Voice, Imagine, and Build,” “Grok API access” and Cursor, per SpaceXSI’s pricing, and of the paid plans here only Muse Code’s Everyday, at $5, costs less. On a plan, the index’s per-task API costs aren’t what you pay, so if your week rarely runs out, what you’d gain by moving is mostly score.

It holds its own on SWE-Atlas’s repository questions, at 63, ahead of Codex’s 59 and 60 and close to Claude Code’s 66. And it’s open source under Apache 2.0, like Codex’s CLI and OpenCode, though its repository is “synced periodically from the SpaceXAI monorepo,” last on September 29 while releases went on to 1.0.77 on November 5, and “External contributions are not accepted.”

If you stay, turn on its sandbox, which limits what an approved command can read, write and reach. It’s “Off by default”; grok --sandbox workspace turns it on for a session. The docs name Landlock on Linux and Seatbelt on macOS, and nothing for Windows.

If you’re leaving because of limits, try the cheaper fixes first: our Grok Build usage limit guide covers credits, upgrades and API keys. If you’re leaving because you want a window, our Grok Build GUI guide covers apps that run the Grok Build you already have.

How we compared

We read SpaceXSI’s Grok Build page, docs, changelog, pricing and help, Grok Build’s repository on GitHub, and Cursor’s pricing and help; Anthropic’s, Meta’s, Google’s and OpenAI’s pricing and docs; OpenCode’s site and docs; and Artificial Analysis’s Coding Agent Index and its comparison pages, all on November 12, 2026, and every one is linked below. The scores are Artificial Analysis’s, from its best-scoring setup for each agent, and its costs are pay-per-token API costs, not plan prices. We quote each maker’s own words for its limits, don’t count features a maker hasn’t documented, and didn’t test these agents ourselves. Plans and scores change often, so we recheck this guide against its sources at least once a month, and the date at the foot of the page says when we last did.