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

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

OpenCode vs Claude Code, compared

Both do the same job: you describe a change, and the agent reads your project, edits files and runs commands until it’s done. The difference is who picks the model. Claude Code is Anthropic’s, and runs Anthropic’s Claude models on a Claude plan. OpenCode, from Anomaly, is “an open source agent that helps you write and run code with any AI model,” on the plan, key or computer you point it at. So the choice is mostly between Claude on Anthropic’s terms and a choice of models on yours.

Option	Best for	Price, checked October 31, 2026	Runs on	Models
Claude Code	The hardest work, on a Claude plan	Claude Pro $20 a month, or $17 billed yearly; Max $100; Ultra $200	Mac, Windows, Linux; VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, a desktop app and the web	Anthropic’s Claude models
OpenCode	Choosing the model, free and open source	Free; models at their providers’ prices; OpenCode Go $10 a month	Mac, Windows, Linux; a desktop app, editor extensions and the web	75+ providers, ChatGPT and Copilot plans, free and local models; Claude by the token
Both, on one project	Claude for the hard parts, other models for the rest	A Claude plan from $20 a month, plus what OpenCode’s models cost	Mac, Windows, Linux	All of the above
Enjoy	Both in one conversation	A monthly subscription on top of your plans, free for 7 days (pricing)	Mac, Windows, Linux	Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, Antigravity, Muse Code, OpenCode

Prices are each company’s US list prices per month, before tax. Claude Code can also run on a Claude Console API key, billed by the token.

How the two differ

	Claude Code	OpenCode
Coding Agent Index, as tested	62, with Opus 5.5 at max effort	49, with GLM-5.3 at max effort
API cost and time per task on the index	$11.42 and 1.0 hour	$5.23 and 56.2 minutes
Cheapest way in	Claude Pro, $20 a month	Free, with its free models or a local one
Your Claude plan	Yes	No; Claude bills by the token
Other plans it signs in with	None	ChatGPT Plus or Pro, GitHub Copilot, GitLab Duo
Open source	No	Yes, under MIT
Permissions out of the box	Auto mode: a second model reviews actions	Most actions allowed without asking
On Windows	Native or WSL; sandboxing needs WSL 2	Native; its docs recommend WSL
Project instructions	CLAUDE.md, or AGENTS.md when there’s none	AGENTS.md, or CLAUDE.md when there’s none

The scores come from Artificial Analysis’s Claude Code vs OpenCode page, which runs each agent with a model on three benchmarks, FrontierCode v1.1, Terminal-Bench 4.0 and SWE-Atlas-QnA-AA, as it stood on October 31. It has tested OpenCode with one model, GLM-5.3, and Claude Code with six, so the gap is as much the models’ as the agents’. Claude Code with Opus 5.5 leads on all three benchmarks, most of all on Terminal-Bench, at 63% to 40%; with Qwen3.8 Max, Claude Code scores 39. The costs are “Pay-per-token API cost,” not plan prices: on a plan, a task draws on your limits instead.

Claude Code

Best for: the hardest work, when you want Claude and already pay for it.

Anthropic calls Claude Code “an agentic coding tool that reads your codebase, edits files, runs commands, and integrates with your development tools,” available “in your terminal, IDE, desktop app, and browser,” per its overview. The terminal version runs on macOS 13 and later, Windows 10 and Linux, per its setup guide. It has the higher score here, and since version 2.1.283 its terminal and VS Code sessions start in auto mode, where “a second model, the classifier, reviews actions instead of you.” 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 “It shares the same usage limits as the rest of your plan.” Pro is $20 a month, or $17 billed yearly; Max is $100, for “5x Pro usage”; and Ultra is $200, with “10x Pro usage” every week and no five-hour limit once your account is verified. “The free claude.ai plan does not include Claude Code access.”

Watch for: it runs Claude, on Anthropic’s terms. “Pro and Max plans have a five-hour session limit and a weekly limit,” says Anthropic’s help center, and “These limits are shared across Claude and Claude Code.” You can point it at another company’s model through a gateway, but Anthropic “doesn’t support routing Claude Code to non-Claude models through any gateway,” per its gateway docs. On the index it’s the slower and dearer of the two, at an hour and $11.42 a task in API prices. It isn’t open source: its license reads “© Anthropic PBC. All rights reserved.” And on native Windows, its setup guide lists sandboxing as “Not supported”; WSL 2 supports it.

OpenCode

Best for: choosing the model, from free and local ones to the ChatGPT or Copilot plan you already pay for.

OpenCode calls itself “The open source AI coding agent.” It’s under the MIT license on GitHub, where it has more than 223,000 stars, and its homepage says it’s “used and trusted by over 16M developers every month.” It’s “Available as a terminal interface, desktop app, and IDE extension,” with desktop builds for macOS, Windows and Linux and extensions for VS Code, Cursor, Zed, Windsurf and VSCodium. It has two built-in modes you switch between with Tab: Build, “the default primary agent with all tools enabled,” and Plan, “A restricted agent designed for planning and analysis,” per its agents docs.

Its models come from wherever you point it. The homepage lists “75+ LLM providers through Models.dev, including local models,” and you can “Log in with OpenAI to use your ChatGPT Plus or Pro account” or “Log in with GitHub to use your Copilot account.” Its provider docs add GitLab Duo, and cover Ollama, LM Studio and llama.cpp on your own computer. It reads Claude Code’s files too: “OpenCode supports Claude Code’s file conventions as fallbacks,” says its rules page, using a CLAUDE.md “if no AGENTS.md exists” and skills from ~/.claude/skills/.

Price: “OpenCode is 100% free to use. It also comes with a set of free models. There might be additional costs if you connect any other provider.” Its Console sells other labs’ models by the token, “selling at cost, with markup only to cover processing fees”: Claude Opus 5.5 is $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output there, as on Anthropic’s own pricing. OpenCode Go, “a low-cost subscription,” is $10 a month, or $40 for Go Plus’s higher limits, with 30 models, among them Kimi K3.1 Pro, Gemini 4 Argon, GLM-5.3, the model Artificial Analysis tested OpenCode with, and Claude Haiku 5.5, but not Opus or Sonnet.

Watch for: your Claude plan doesn’t work in it. Of plugins that bring Claude Pro or Max plans in, its provider docs say “Anthropic explicitly prohibits this,” and OpenCode stopped shipping them in version 1.3.0. Anthropic’s terms don’t permit third-party developers “to route requests through Free, Pro, Max, or Ultra plan credentials on behalf of their users,” so Claude in OpenCode bills by the token, on top of any Claude plan you have. Out of the box it asks little: “Most permissions default to "allow",” says its permissions page, so set the edits and commands you want to approve to "ask". Go has limits of its own, “20% of the monthly allowance per 5 hours, 50% per week, and 100% per month.” Its free models are free “for a limited time,” and for several of them, “The team is using this time to collect feedback and improve the model.” On Windows, its installation docs say “we recommend using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).” OpenCode 2 is out beside OpenCode 1, and the two “cannot be installed side by side under their default command.” And on October 17, OpenCode said attackers had reached an older system behind OpenCode Console, its optional hosted service, exposing provider keys some users had saved there; the open-source app wasn’t affected, by its account, as our memo on the breach explains.

Both, on one project

Best for: Claude on the hard parts, and a cheaper or local model for the rest.

You don’t have to choose. One instruction file serves both: Claude Code “can read AGENTS.md as your project instructions, so a repository already set up for other coding agents works without adding a CLAUDE.md,” per its memory docs, and OpenCode reads AGENTS.md first, then CLAUDE.md. One way to split the work: Claude Code, on your Claude plan, plans and makes the hard changes, and OpenCode, with a ChatGPT plan, OpenCode Go or a local model, takes the tests, renames and upkeep you’d rather not spend Claude’s limits on.

Price: a Claude plan, from $20 a month, plus whatever OpenCode’s models cost: nothing for free and local ones, $10 a month for Go, or the ChatGPT plan you already have.

Watch for: each keeps its own conversations, so when you move a task from one to the other, you tell the second where things stand. If a repository has both files, Claude Code reads only CLAUDE.md and OpenCode only AGENTS.md, so keep them in step, or have your CLAUDE.md import AGENTS.md, as Claude Code’s docs describe.

Enjoy

Best for: Claude Code and OpenCode in one conversation, handing the work from one to the other when a plan runs out.

Enjoy is a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux that runs Claude Code on your Claude plan and OpenCode with the providers set up in it, along with Codex, Grok Build, Antigravity and Muse Code. It installs OpenCode for you, and its Model column lists the models OpenCode offers from your providers, local ones included. What it adds for these two:

• One conversation, either 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, then have OpenCode with a cheaper model write the tests.
• A way through Claude’s limits. When Claude Code runs out, Enjoy switches to another of your Claude accounts with usage left, or waits for the reset and carries on. Select Stop waiting to carry on with OpenCode instead.
• OpenCode’s approvals, as cards. “When OpenCode’s permission settings say to ask first, Enjoy shows an approval card in the conversation,” and its Build and Plan modes are in Enjoy’s Permissions column.
• A night shift. A scheduled workflow can run OpenCode with a local model overnight, with no plan to run out.

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 bring your Claude plan into OpenCode: Claude Code runs on it, and OpenCode on the providers set up in OpenCode, which you add in a terminal with opencode auth login. Enjoy shows Usage unavailable for OpenCode, “because usage depends on each provider,” and “the only effort choice is Model default.” Waiting for a reset needs “Your computer must be on, with Enjoy open, when the usage resets,” and scheduled workflows 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 to stay with the one you have

Stay with Claude Code if Claude does your work and you rarely run out: it’s the higher scorer, it comes with the plan you pay for, and it waits out a session limit by itself. If limits are the problem, a bigger Claude plan or usage credits may cost less than a second agent, as our Claude plans guide works out.

Stay with OpenCode if you like choosing the model, already pay for ChatGPT or Copilot, or want an agent you can read and change. Moving to Claude Code buys Anthropic’s top score on a flat monthly price, and gives up the choice of model.

Add the other when one plan’s limits stop you most weeks, or when you want a second model’s view of the same code. Our Claude Code alternatives guide compares OpenCode with the other agents people move to.

How we compared

We read Anthropic’s pricing, help center, Claude Code docs, terms and license; OpenCode’s homepage, its docs on installation, providers, rules, permissions, agents, Console and Go, its downloads page and its GitHub repository; and Artificial Analysis’s Claude Code vs OpenCode comparison, all on October 31, 2026, and every one is linked below. Star counts come from GitHub that day. We quote each company’s own words for its limits and leave out what it hasn’t documented. The index has tested OpenCode with one model, so we give its figures as tested, not as a verdict on the agent. 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.