Muse Code vs Claude Code vs Codex in 2026: which coding agent to use, and when

Disclosure: Enjoy is our product, and it runs all three agents. We checked every fact below against Meta’s, Anthropic’s, OpenAI’s and Artificial Analysis’s own pages on October 31, 2026, and we say where you don’t need Enjoy at all.

Muse Code vs Claude Code vs Codex, compared

All three do the same job: you describe a change, and the agent reads your project, edits files and runs commands until it’s done. Muse Code comes from Meta, Claude Code from Anthropic and Codex from OpenAI, and each runs on its own company’s plans, so choosing one mostly means choosing which subscription to pay for. Muse Code has the cheapest paid plan of the three, and since Meta added Muse Wonder Full to its $50 and $200 plans on October 12, it scores within 3 points of Claude Code.

Option	Best for	Price, checked October 31, 2026	Runs on	Open source
Muse Code	The cheapest paid plan, and a near-top score for $50	Everyday $5 a month; High $15; Power $50, with Muse Wonder Full; Maximum $200	Mac, Windows, Linux	No; its SDK is MIT-licensed
Claude Code	The hardest work	Claude Pro $20 a month, or $17 billed yearly; Max $100; Ultra $200	Mac, Windows, Linux	No
Codex	The lowest cost per task, and a free start	Free and Go ($8) in the desktop app, with GPT-6 Luna; Plus $20; Pro $100, $200 or $500	Mac, Windows, Linux	The CLI, Apache 2.0
Enjoy	All three in one conversation	A monthly subscription on top of your plans, free for 7 days (pricing)	Mac, Windows, Linux	No

Prices are each company’s US list prices per month, before tax. All three agents can also run on an API key that bills per token instead of a plan.

How the three score

	Muse Code	Claude Code	Codex
Coding Agent Index, best setup	59, with Muse Wonder Full at max effort	62, with Opus 5.5 at max effort	55, with GPT-6 Astra at max effort
Other setups	52 with Muse Wonder; 46 with Muse Spark 1.3	59 with Sonnet 5.5; 58 with Fable 5.1	54 with GPT-6.1 Sol
API cost per task	Not given for Muse Wonder Full; $8.05 with Muse Wonder; $3.91 with Muse Spark 1.3	$11.42	$7.04 with GPT-6 Astra; $1.50 with GPT-6.1 Sol
Time per task	34.9 minutes	1.0 hour	24.8 minutes with GPT-6 Astra
Turns per task	194.9	146.4	39.4 with GPT-6 Astra

The figures come from Artificial Analysis’s Coding Agent Index, which runs each agent and model together on three benchmarks, FrontierCode v1.1, Terminal-Bench 4.0 and SWE-Atlas-QnA-AA, as its Claude Code vs Muse Code and Codex vs Muse Code pages stood on October 31.

Muse Code’s best setup lands between the other two. It leads the repository questions of SWE-Atlas, at 69% against Claude Code’s 66% and Codex’s 59%; it beats Codex on Terminal-Bench, 59% to 56%, and trails Claude Code’s 63%; and on FrontierCode it ties Codex at 49%, behind Claude Code’s 56%. Artificial Analysis gives no cost for Muse Wonder Full, which you can only use on a Muse Code subscription, and its costs are API prices: “Many users will access coding agent harnesses through subscription plan offerings rather than pay-per-token.” On a plan, a task draws on your limits instead.

Muse Code

Best for: the cheapest paid start, and, on Power at $50 a month, a score close to Claude Code’s.

Muse Code is “Meta’s coding agent for the terminal and CI, built for Muse Spark,” its docs say, with “approvals and an OS sandbox on from the first run.” It runs as a terminal app, headless with muse exec for scripts and CI, or from your own program through its SDK, and it “runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows from one codebase.” Meta’s product page calls it “Multi-agent by default”: “Workers in parallel, reviewers in the background.”

New sessions start in Auto-review, where its permissions guide says “an automated reviewer” decides the approval requests it can, and “when the reviewer is unavailable, it falls back to asking you.” It reviews a compound shell command “one stage at a time, not as a single line.” And it reads the other two agents’ instruction files: “At each directory level, it checks AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .agents/AGENTS.md, then .claude/CLAUDE.md,” per its configuration page, once you trust the workspace.

Its models include Muse Spark 1.3 and Muse Wonder, which Meta introduced on October 12 with Muse Wonder Full, its strongest. Meta’s models page says Muse Wonder Full “is available only in Muse Code with a subscription.”

Price: Meta’s Muse Code page lists four monthly plans. Everyday Usage, at $5, lets you “Send 10-50 prompts every 5 hours.” High Usage, at $15, has “5x more usage than the Everyday Usage plan”; Power Usage, at $50, has 20 times and “Access to the most powerful Muse models, including Muse Wonder Full”; and Maximum Usage, at $200, has 80 times. Meta lists no free plan. With a Meta API key, you pay per token instead: Muse Spark 1.3 is $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output, or $0.10 and $0.20 in its contributor version, and Muse Wonder is $4 and $20.

Watch for: Contributor mode. “Muse Code subscriptions default to Contributor mode. In Contributor mode, you get more usage from your plan in exchange for letting Meta use your content to train future Meta models,” says its subscription guide, and your content means “the prompts, code, files, and context you send, plus the model responses you get back.” You can turn it off in /settings, but “Muse Code saves the setting on the computer you’re using,” and “On a new computer, your first interactive session turns Contributor mode on.” On Windows, “Voice input is unavailable” and “Session messaging is unavailable,” and the sandbox “may prompt for administrator approval.” On the top plan, “If you are on the Maximum Usage plan, you must wait for your limit to refresh.” Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full “aren’t currently available in South Korea.” And Meta doesn’t call Muse Code open source: its GitHub has the Muse Code SDK, under MIT, but not the agent.

Claude Code

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

Claude Code runs in a terminal on macOS, Windows and Linux, per its setup guide. It has the top score of the three, and when a limit stops it partway through a task, its docs say “Claude Code waits in the open session and continues the task on its own after the limit resets.”

Price: “Claude Code is included in all paid plans,” says Claude’s pricing, and the Free plan leaves it out. Pro is $20 a month, or $17 billed yearly; Max is $100, for “5x Pro usage”; and Ultra is $200, with “No 5-hour limit” for verified accounts and “10x Pro usage” every week. Fable 5.1 comes with Max and Ultra, “up to half your weekly limit,” and is “paid with usage credits” on Pro.

Watch for: the limits are shared with your Claude chats, so “your work in the terminal and your chats draw from one pool.” It’s the slowest of the three on the index, at an hour a task, and its cheapest plan, at $20, costs four times Muse Code’s. Claude Code isn’t open source: its license reads “© Anthropic PBC. All rights reserved.” And on native Windows, its setup guide lists sandboxing as “Not supported”; it needs WSL 2 for that.

Codex

Best for: the lowest cost per task, a free start, and Windows.

Codex runs in the ChatGPT desktop app, and on Plus and up “on the web, in the CLI, in the IDE extension, and on iOS.” The desktop app is for “macOS, Windows, or Linux,” and on Windows it “runs natively on Windows using PowerShell and the Windows sandbox,” per its Windows page. The Codex CLI is open source under Apache 2.0. On the index, GPT-6.1 Sol scores 54 for $1.50 a task, under a fifth of Muse Wonder’s cost for 2 points more.

Price: Free, and Go at $8 a month, get “GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app, subject to rollout,” per Codex’s pricing. Plus, at $20, adds GPT-6.1 Sol, which OpenAI estimates at 15 to 160 local messages every five hours, and Pro is $100, $200 or $500 a month, where “Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit.”

Watch for: OpenAI says its counts “are not fixed message limits,” and Codex with GPT-6 Luna, the free plans’ model, scores 31 on the index, far below Sol. And its best setup scores 4 points below Muse Code’s, so on the index it’s third of the three.

Enjoy

Best for: using all three in one conversation, and keeping going when one runs out.

Enjoy runs Muse Code, Claude Code and Codex, along with Grok Build, Antigravity and local models through OpenCode, on Mac, Windows and Linux, each signed in with the plan you already have. What it adds for these three:

• One conversation, any agent. Switch agents at any point: “The new agent gets the conversation so far, including replies from other agents, before it works on your message.” Plan with Claude Code, build with Codex, and have Muse Code review it on its $5 plan.
• Limits handled. When an agent runs out, Enjoy switches to another of your accounts with usage left, or waits for the reset and carries on: “This works the same for every agent.”
• Muse Code without the terminal. It gets the same message box as the other agents, with its approvals as cards, and its usage, such as 5 hours and Weekly, with when each limit resets.

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 your other computers, and each teammate you invite needs a subscription of their own. See pricing.

Watch for: Enjoy doesn’t add one lab’s models to another lab’s plan: each agent runs on its own company’s subscription, and Muse Code’s Contributor mode stays on in Enjoy until you turn it off in Muse Code’s settings. Muse Code “uses one account in every project,” where Claude Code and Codex can keep several signed in, and it shows its limits only “once Muse Code has replied to a message in the project.” Waiting for a reset needs “Your computer must be on, with Enjoy open, when the usage resets,” and scheduled workflows also run only while it’s awake with Enjoy open. Enjoy isn’t open source, and it’s a monthly subscription on top of your AI plans once the free week ends.

When one agent is enough

If you already pay for one and rarely run out, a second plan buys little. Stay with Claude Code when its results are why you pay, and wait out a session limit or buy usage credits when you hit one. Stay with Codex when cost per task, a free start or Windows matter most. Stay with Muse Code when $5 or $15 a month covers your week, or when Power’s Muse Wonder Full, at $50, does your work, and you’ve decided about Contributor mode.

Add a second agent when one plan’s limits stop you most weeks, or when you want another lab’s review of the same code. Muse Code’s Everyday plan is the cheapest way to add one, and since it reads AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md, a project set up for the others works in it as it is. Our Claude Code vs Codex guide covers that pairing in more depth.

How we compared

We read Meta’s Muse Code page, docs, subscription, billing, permissions and configuration guides, changelog, models page, Muse Wonder page and announcement, and its GitHub organization; Anthropic’s pricing, Claude Code docs and license; OpenAI’s Codex and ChatGPT pricing and desktop app docs; and Artificial Analysis’s index and comparison pages, all on October 31, 2026, and every one is linked below. We quote each company’s own words for its limits and leave out what it hasn’t documented: Meta, for one, states a five-hour allowance only for Everyday and no weekly one, though Muse Code reports weekly use. Artificial Analysis rounds scores on its comparison pages, so the scores here are whole numbers. Plans and models 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.