Search “gemini cli vs claude code” today and a lot of what comes back is already stale. On June 18, 2026, Google cut off free access to Gemini CLI for individual developers, the open-source terminal agent that had pulled in more than 100,000 GitHub stars in just over a year. Anyone still running the old install command now gets pointed toward Antigravity CLI, Google’s closed-source successor. Anthropic’s Claude Code kept shipping through the same stretch, and made Claude Sonnet 5 its new default model days later.
This comparison covers what actually exists right now: Claude Code against the tool that replaced Gemini CLI, using pricing, benchmark scores, and context-window numbers pulled from Anthropic’s and Google’s own documentation, not screenshots from a February blog post. If a guide you bookmarked earlier this year still lists a free Gemini CLI tier for individuals, treat the rest of its numbers as suspect too.
Below is a full specs table, three pricing structures, the SWE-Bench Pro scores Anthropic and Google have actually published, a migration path for anyone still on the old Gemini CLI install, and a verdict built on what each tool costs to run across a real week of work.
The stakes go beyond personal preference. Engineering leads who standardized their team on Gemini CLI a year ago now have a procurement decision to make in the middle of a budget cycle, not at renewal time. That’s a different kind of urgency than a routine tool comparison, and it’s why the pricing and migration sections further down matter as much as the benchmark numbers.
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What Changed on June 18, 2026
The shutdown didn’t happen overnight. Google’s Gemini Code Assist deprecations page marked consumer accounts for retirement on May 18, 2026, with a shutdown date of June 18, 2026. The next day, Google published its official transition notice, stating that Antigravity CLI was available to everyone starting that day. A month later, on June 18, Gemini CLI and the Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions stopped serving requests for three groups: Google AI Pro subscribers, Google AI Ultra subscribers, and unpaid individual accounts.
Enterprise customers were carved out. Anyone on a Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license kept access with no interruption, and so did developers paying through the Gemini API or the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The Register covered the move under the headline “Bye bye Gemini CLI,” and Tech Times reported that Google had accepted more than 6,000 community code contributions to the open-source project before restricting the hosted service to paying and enterprise users.
The GitHub repository itself, google-gemini/gemini-cli, is still online and still Apache 2.0 licensed. What disappeared was the free hosted backend that let an individual developer run 60 requests a minute against Gemini 2.5 Pro without paying anything. That’s the detail most older comparison articles miss, because they were written before the cutoff and never got updated. Six weeks on, the practical question isn’t “Gemini CLI or Claude Code” anymore. It’s “Antigravity CLI or Claude Code,” with legacy Gemini CLI surviving only where an enterprise contract or an API key is already in place.
The developer reaction split roughly two ways. Teams that had already scaled past the free tier’s 1,000-requests-a-day ceiling, and were paying through the Gemini API anyway, barely noticed the change since their billing path never touched the consumer product. Hobbyists and students who leaned on the free allowance had a much rougher month, with a handful of threads on Hacker News and Reddit’s developer communities flagging the short notice window between the May 19 announcement and the June 18 cutoff. A month is enough time to switch tools. It’s not much time to re-architect a pipeline that was quietly load-bearing.
What Gemini CLI Was, and What Antigravity CLI Is Now
Gemini CLI launched in June 2025 as Google’s answer to terminal-first coding agents, open-sourced under Apache 2.0 from day one. That licensing choice, plus a genuinely usable free tier, is a big part of why it crossed 100,000 GitHub stars faster than almost any other developer tool in Google’s history. The free tier ran on Gemini 2.5 Pro, capped at 60 requests per minute and 1,000 requests per day per personal Google account, with a 1 million token context window attached even at the free level. It supported Model Context Protocol servers out of the box, tagged directly in the repo metadata as mcp-client and mcp-server, and it connected to editors through the Gemini Code Assist extension line.
The Antigravity Handoff
Antigravity CLI is not a rebrand of the same binary. Google built it as a closed-source Go binary distributed inside the broader Antigravity 2.0 agent-development platform, which also includes an IDE-style surface separate from the command-line tool. The practical distinction: Antigravity CLI is the terminal-facing piece, while the Antigravity IDE is the fuller development environment that wraps around it. For a developer used to typing gemini and getting to work, the muscle memory doesn’t carry over cleanly. It’s a fresh install pointed at a different backend, not an in-place upgrade.
On model access, Antigravity CLI runs on Gemini 3 and Gemini 3.1 Pro rather than the free tier’s Gemini 2.5 Pro. Google’s own API pricing lists Gemini 3.1 Pro at roughly $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens, a rate that shows up consistently across Google’s published pricing pages. Google AI Pro remains priced around $20 a month, with Google AI Ultra sitting near $250 a month for the heaviest individual users. Unlike the old Gemini CLI free tier, Antigravity CLI itself is still available to everyone at no cost, according to Google’s own transition announcement, with the paid tiers buying higher rate limits and access to the newer Gemini 3.1 Pro model rather than gating the tool itself.
What Claude Code Is, and Which Model It Runs Today
Claude Code is Anthropic’s terminal coding agent, rolled out through 2025 as a companion to the Claude app rather than a free-standing open-source project. There’s no public GitHub star count to compare against Gemini CLI’s, because the core agent is closed source. That’s the first structural difference buyers need to sit with: one tool’s popularity is visible in a repository, the other’s shows up only in subscription and usage numbers Anthropic doesn’t fully publish.
Sonnet 5 by Default, Opus 4.8 or Fable 5 on Request
According to Anthropic’s own Claude Code changelog, Claude Sonnet 5 became the default model for Pro, Team Standard, and Enterprise seats as of the June 30, 2026 update. Sonnet 5 is the cost-optimized tier, and Anthropic has not published a SWE-Bench Pro or SWE-bench Verified score for it in any tracker reviewed for this piece. Developers who need more coding horsepower can point Claude Code at Claude Opus 4.8, or at the newer Claude Fable 5, part of Anthropic’s Mythos tier that launched June 9, 2026 sitting above Opus in both price and published benchmark scores. Both are available inside the same Claude Code interface, selected through account tier and model configuration rather than a separate install.
Context handling scales with the model too. Anthropic’s context window documentation puts the ceiling at 1 million tokens for supported models, with a 200,000 token default for everything else. Claude Opus 4.6 was the first Opus-class model to ship that 1M-token option in beta, according to Anthropic’s own announcement, and the larger window has since carried forward into later releases. There’s no free tier at any point in this stack. Claude Code access comes bundled into Claude Pro at $20 a month, Claude Max 5x at $100 a month, or Claude Max 20x at $200 a month, and every one of those numbers has held steady across Anthropic’s pricing page through mid-2026.
Anthropic has also been explicit that Claude Code isn’t meant to live only inside its own branded terminal. The company positions it as the coding layer behind other products too, and Claude models already power coding features inside third-party editors such as Cursor and Windsurf, alongside the standalone Claude Code CLI. That distribution strategy is different from Google’s, which has consolidated its coding-agent effort into two first-party products, Antigravity CLI and the Antigravity IDE, rather than licensing the underlying model out as widely for coding-specific integrations.
Where This Fits in the Broader AI Coding Assistant Market
Gemini CLI and Claude Code don’t compete in a vacuum. Both sit inside a crowded coding-tools category that also includes GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, and a growing list of terminal-first agents chasing the same developers. What makes the Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI transition unusual is that it’s a rare case of a major vendor pulling back a free tier in a market where the general trend has run the other direction, with most competitors adding free allowances to win developer mindshare rather than removing them.
That makes Claude Code’s position more interesting than it looks at first glance. Anthropic never offered a free Claude Code tier, so it isn’t taking the same reputational hit Google is right now. Instead, Anthropic’s approach has been to keep expanding what a single subscription covers, folding Claude Code access into the same Pro and Max plans that already cover Claude’s chat interface and API console. For a developer or a small team, that bundling can be a genuine advantage over juggling a separate line item for a coding agent on top of everything else already running through Google Workspace or an internal Vertex AI budget.
The open-source question is worth sitting with too. Gemini CLI’s Apache 2.0 license was a real differentiator, letting security teams audit the client code and letting the community file the sort of pull requests that added up to more than 6,000 accepted contributions. Antigravity CLI drops that openness. Claude Code was never open source to begin with, so switching to it isn’t a downgrade on that front, it’s simply the same closed-source posture Anthropic has held since launch. Teams that specifically valued Gemini CLI’s auditability now have to weigh whether that property mattered enough to rule out both of the realistic replacement paths.
Gemini CLI vs Claude Code vs Antigravity CLI: Specs at a Glance
The table below lines up all three products, since “Gemini CLI vs Claude Code” now really means comparing Claude Code against two different Google products depending on what kind of account you have.
| Category | Gemini CLI (legacy) | Antigravity CLI | Claude Code |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status as of July 2026 | Enterprise and paid-API access only | General availability since May 19, 2026 | Actively developed, primary agent |
| License | Apache 2.0, open source | Closed source | Closed source |
| Launched | June 2025 | May 19, 2026 | Rolled out through 2025 |
| Default model | Gemini 2.5 Pro (legacy free tier) | Gemini 3 / Gemini 3.1 Pro | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| Upgrade models available | N/A | Gemini 3.1 Pro (paid tiers) | Claude Opus 4.8, Claude Fable 5 |
| Context window | 1,000,000 tokens | Not separately published | Up to 1,000,000 tokens (200K default) |
| Free tier for individuals | Ended June 18, 2026 | Yes, available to everyone | None, ever |
| Entry paid plan | Google AI Pro, ~$20/month | Google AI Pro, ~$20/month | Claude Pro, $20/month |
| Heaviest individual plan | Google AI Ultra, ~$250/month | Google AI Ultra, ~$250/month | Claude Max 20x, $200/month |
| API input price (per 1M tokens) | $2 (Gemini 3.1 Pro) | $2 (Gemini 3.1 Pro) | ~$3 (Sonnet 5) / $5 (Opus 4.8) / $10 (Fable 5) |
| API output price (per 1M tokens) | $12 (Gemini 3.1 Pro) | $12 (Gemini 3.1 Pro) | ~$15 (Sonnet 5) / $25 (Opus 4.8) / $50 (Fable 5) |
| MCP support | Yes | Inherited from Gemini CLI codebase | Yes |
| IDE integration | Gemini Code Assist extensions | Antigravity IDE and CLI stack | VS Code, JetBrains, terminal |
| GitHub stars | 100,000+ (Google, May 2026) | Not open source | Not publicly disclosed |
| Published SWE-Bench Pro score | Not published for Gemini 3.1 Pro | Not published | 69.2% (Opus 4.8), 80.3% (Fable 5) |
A few rows are worth a second look. Gemini CLI’s legacy free tier and Antigravity CLI both plug into the same $2/$12 per million token pricing when you go through the paid Gemini API, since Antigravity CLI is the newer front door to the same underlying Gemini 3.1 Pro model. Claude Code never had a free row to lose, so its column looks unchanged next to Gemini’s, even though the real story is that Google’s free option moved to a new product name rather than disappearing outright.
Pricing Compared: Free Tiers, Subscriptions, and API Rates
Money is where this comparison actually gets interesting, because the two product families are priced on completely different logic. Google prices by request volume and model tier, Anthropic prices by subscription tier with usage folded in. Neither approach is wrong, but they land very differently depending on how much code you’re generating in a given month.
| Tier | Gemini / Antigravity | Claude Code |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Antigravity CLI, unlimited signup, rate-limited | None at any tier |
| Entry subscription | Google AI Pro, ~$20/month | Claude Pro, $20/month |
| Mid subscription | Not offered as a distinct tier | Claude Max 5x, $100/month |
| Heavy subscription | Google AI Ultra, ~$250/month | Claude Max 20x, $200/month |
| API input (per 1M tokens) | $2 (Gemini 3.1 Pro) | $3–$10 depending on model |
| API output (per 1M tokens) | $12 (Gemini 3.1 Pro) | $15–$50 depending on model |
| Enterprise | Gemini Code Assist Standard/Enterprise license | Claude Team/Enterprise, custom pricing |
Read the API rows carefully before picking a side. Anthropic’s cheapest model in Claude Code, Sonnet 5, runs at roughly $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, already 50 percent higher than Gemini 3.1 Pro’s published $2/$12 rate. Step up to Opus 4.8 for harder agentic work and the gap widens to $5/$25, and Fable 5 doubles that again to $10/$50, a price Anthropic itself confirms is exactly double Opus 4.8’s rate. For a team burning tens of millions of tokens a month on autonomous pull-request review, that spread compounds fast. For a solo developer sending a few hundred prompts a day, the flat $20 Claude Pro subscription can undercut metered API pricing entirely, since it isn’t billed per token at all.
The subscription side tells a different story. Claude Max 20x tops out at $200 a month, which is actually cheaper than Google AI Ultra’s roughly $250 a month, even though Google’s plan is the one still offering a genuinely free entry point through Antigravity CLI. Anthropic’s rate limits aren’t fully published either. Independent trackers estimate Claude Pro at somewhere around 45 messages every five-hour window, though Anthropic has not confirmed that exact figure, and Max tiers multiply the ceiling by 5x and 20x respectively rather than removing it.
Run the numbers on a mid-size workload and the gap turns concrete. A team processing 50 million input tokens and 10 million output tokens in a month would pay roughly $220 through the Gemini 3.1 Pro API, at $2 and $12 per million tokens respectively. The same volume against Claude Code’s default Sonnet 5 lands at roughly $300, and against Opus 4.8 it climbs to about $200. That’s before factoring in that many teams will find a flat Claude Max subscription cheaper than metered API billing once usage gets heavy enough, since the $100 and $200 monthly tiers don’t scale per token the way raw API access does. The right comparison depends entirely on whether a team is buying a subscription seat or metering raw API calls, and conflating the two is where a lot of “Claude is more expensive” claims fall apart under scrutiny.
Benchmark Performance: The SWE-Bench Pro Numbers Anthropic and Google Actually Published
Benchmark claims are where most comparison articles get sloppy, mixing model versions and quietly swapping SWE-bench Verified for the harder SWE-Bench Pro suite without saying so. Here’s what’s actually confirmed, sourced back to Anthropic’s own disclosures and cross-checked against independent routers like OpenRouter.
SWE-Bench Pro matters here because it’s a harder, less saturated successor to the original SWE-bench suite that a lot of frontier models had started topping out on. It scores a model on real, unresolved GitHub issues pulled from live repositories rather than a fixed, well-studied test set, which makes it harder for a lab to quietly optimize a model against the benchmark itself. That’s also why the gap between Opus 4.8 and Fable 5 is treated as meaningful inside Anthropic rather than noise. An 11-point jump on a benchmark built to resist easy gaming is a different kind of signal than an 11-point jump on a saturated one.
| Model | SWE-Bench Pro | GPQA Diamond | Role in Claude Code |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5 (Mythos tier) | 80.3% | 92.6% | Top-tier option, launched June 9, 2026 |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | 69.2% | 93.6% | Mainline upgrade tier |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | Not published | Not published | Default model since June 30, 2026 |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | Not published | Not published | Powers Antigravity CLI’s paid access |
Claude Fable 5’s 80.3% on SWE-Bench Pro is a model-specific benchmark score.1-point jump over Opus 4.8’s 80.3%, and Anthropic highlighted that gap in the Fable 5 launch, priced at $10/$50 per million tokens versus Opus 4.8 at $5/$25.8 to match. Neither Sonnet 5 nor Gemini 3.1 Pro has a confirmed SWE-Bench Pro or SWE-bench Verified figure in the trackers reviewed for this comparison, which is a real gap in public benchmarking rather than a defeat for either model. Gemini 3.1 Pro shows up as a reported leader in separate coding-arena head-to-head evaluations, a different measurement than SWE-Bench Pro, so treat any blog claiming a direct percentage for it with real skepticism until Google publishes one.
The practical read: if agentic coding benchmark scores are the deciding factor, Claude Code has a real, sourced edge through Opus 4.8 and Fable 5, at a real cost premium over Gemini’s per-token pricing. If you’re running Claude Code on its new default, Sonnet 5, you’re not automatically buying that benchmark lead. You’re buying Anthropic’s cheaper, faster tier, and the burden shifts to Opus 4.8 or Fable 5 if raw coding accuracy matters more than cost.
Context Windows and Multi-File Editing
Both ecosystems now advertise a 1 million token ceiling, but they got there on different timelines and with different defaults. Gemini CLI shipped 1M tokens as a free-tier feature from close to the start, which is a big part of why it became popular with developers working across large monorepos. Claude’s path was slower and tier-gated. Anthropic’s context window documentation confirms the 1M-token option exists today for supported models, but the default for most Claude Code sessions is still 200,000 tokens unless you’re on a model and plan that unlocks the larger window.
In day-to-day use, that gap matters most on genuinely large codebases, the kind where a single refactor touches forty or fifty files at once. A 200K window can still hold a lot of code, but it forces more chunking and re-summarizing on a sprawling repository than a 1M window does. Where Claude tends to claw the difference back is in how it uses the tokens it has. Multiple independent write-ups, including Anthropic’s own framing around Opus 4.8 and Fable 5, point to stronger multi-step reasoning and fewer wasted retries per file touched, which can offset a smaller raw window on tasks that are deep rather than wide.
MCP Support and the Extension Ecosystem
Model Context Protocol support is one area where this comparison isn’t close to a coin flip, because both sides actually shipped it. Gemini CLI’s GitHub repository tags itself directly with mcp-client and mcp-server, and that support carried forward into Antigravity CLI since it’s built on the same underlying codebase. Claude Code has documented MCP support as well, letting it connect to the same category of external tool servers, whether that’s a database connector, a design tool, or an internal company API wrapped as an MCP server.
What this means practically: a team that already invested engineering time building MCP servers for one tool isn’t locked out of the other. The servers themselves are protocol-compliant, not tool-specific, so a Slack MCP server or a Postgres MCP server built for Gemini CLI should connect to Claude Code with configuration changes rather than a rewrite. The bigger differentiator ends up being IDE-level extensions rather than MCP itself, since that’s where the two products diverge more sharply.
For anyone unfamiliar with the protocol, an MCP server is essentially a small adapter that exposes an external system, a database, a ticketing tool, an internal API, to the coding agent in a structured way, so the agent can query a Jira board or run a read-only database lookup without a developer hand-writing that integration for each tool separately. Before MCP existed, that kind of connector had to be built once per coding assistant, which is exactly the duplicated effort the protocol was designed to eliminate. Both Google and Anthropic backing the same standard is arguably the most durable thing to come out of this whole comparison, since it means the tooling investment a team makes today isn’t tied to whichever vendor wins the pricing war next year.
IDE and Terminal Experience
Claude Code ships official integrations for VS Code and JetBrains on top of its terminal mode, according to Anthropic’s own documentation. That covers the two editor families most professional developers already use, without requiring a separate IDE download. Gemini CLI’s editor story runs through the Gemini Code Assist extension line, which plugs into a similar spread of editors, though Google’s own transition notice signals that future investment is shifting toward the Antigravity IDE rather than continued expansion of the older Code Assist extensions.
Antigravity itself is a bigger swing than a simple extension. Google built it as a fuller agent-development platform, with the CLI as one entry point into a broader environment rather than a lightweight terminal add-on. Developers who liked Gemini CLI specifically because it stayed out of the way, a fast terminal tool and nothing more, may find Antigravity’s larger footprint is a different trade-off than the one they originally signed up for. Claude Code, by contrast, has kept a narrower terminal-first identity since launch, with IDE extensions layered on top rather than replacing the core experience.
Five Real-World Situations This Shutdown Actually Created
The June 18 cutoff wasn’t an abstract policy change. It forced real decisions on real teams within a single billing cycle. Here’s what that looked like in practice.
- CI pipelines built on the free tier. Any GitHub Actions workflow calling Gemini CLI’s free 1,000-requests-a-day allowance had to be re-pointed at either Antigravity CLI or a paid Gemini API key before June 18, or the pipeline simply started failing mid-run.
- Solo developers on side projects. A developer running Gemini CLI for a nights-and-weekends project, comfortably inside the 60-requests-a-minute cap, had two real options once the free tier closed: move to Antigravity CLI, which stayed free, or start paying $20 a month for Claude Pro instead.
- Enterprise teams on Code Assist licenses. Organizations already paying for Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise saw no disruption at all on June 18, since Google explicitly excluded licensed enterprise accounts from the consumer cutoff.
- Autonomous PR-review agents. Platform teams running unsupervised, long-horizon coding agents increasingly point them at Claude Code configured for Opus 4.8 or Fable 5, trading a higher per-token cost for the confirmed SWE-Bench Pro gap over Sonnet 5’s unpublished score.
- Teams with existing MCP tooling. Engineering groups that had already wired up MCP servers for Gemini CLI found most of that investment carried over cleanly to Claude Code, since MCP is a shared protocol rather than a tool-specific feature.
Which Tool Fits Which Use Case
Neither tool wins across every scenario, and the June 2026 shakeup makes the “it depends” answer more precise than it used to be.
- Zero budget, individual use: Antigravity CLI, since it’s the only genuinely free option left standing after June 18.
- Teams already paying for Claude subscriptions: Claude Code, because access is bundled into Pro, Max 5x, or Max 20x seats the organization likely already owns.
- Large enterprises on Google Workspace or Vertex AI contracts: Legacy Gemini CLI through an existing Code Assist license, or Antigravity CLI where a fresh evaluation makes more sense.
- Long-running, unsupervised agentic coding pipelines: Claude Code set to Opus 4.8 or Fable 5, backed by the published 69.2% and 80.3% SWE-Bench Pro scores.
- High request volume on a tight budget: Gemini 3.1 Pro’s API pricing at $2/$12 per million tokens undercuts every Claude Code model tier, including the default Sonnet 5.
- JetBrains-first development shops: Claude Code, which has a documented JetBrains plugin alongside VS Code support.
- Teams with sunk cost in MCP servers: Either tool, since both maintain MCP support and the servers themselves aren’t locked to one vendor.
Migration Guide: Moving Off the Old Gemini CLI
If you’re still running the pre-June install, here’s the actual path off it, in order.
- Check which access path you’re actually on. If your account runs through a Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license, nothing broke on June 18 and no migration is required.
- If you were on the free individual tier, decide between Antigravity CLI (free, Google’s designated successor) and Claude Code (paid, a different model family entirely).
- Treat Antigravity CLI as a fresh install, not an upgrade. It’s a separate closed-source binary distributed through Google’s Antigravity 2.0 platform, not a patched version of the old
geminicommand. - For Claude Code, install through npm, authenticate against a Claude Pro or Max plan (or an API key), and confirm you’re aware Sonnet 5 is now the default model rather than an older Sonnet version.
- Port over any MCP servers you built for Gemini CLI. Both destinations support the same protocol, so configuration changes are the more likely fix than a rewrite.
- Re-test CI/CD pipelines that hardcoded the old free-tier rate limits of 60 requests a minute and 1,000 a day. Both replacement paths carry different limits.
- Budget for the cost delta. Claude Code has no free tier at all, so a migration from a free Gemini CLI account to Claude Code is a net-new monthly expense, not a lateral move.
The install commands for the two products that still exist as of this writing look like this:
# Legacy Gemini CLI (individual free access ended June 18, 2026)
npm install -g @google/gemini-cli
gemini
# Claude Code
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
claudeAntigravity CLI isn’t distributed through that same npm package, so there’s no single-line upgrade path from the old Gemini CLI install. Google’s transition announcement points developers to a separate download as part of the Antigravity 2.0 platform, which is worth budgeting an actual setup session for rather than assuming a five-minute swap.
Pros and Cons
Claude Code: Pros and Cons
- Pro: Published, sourced SWE-Bench Pro leads through Opus 4.8 (80.3%) and Fable 5 (80.3%), the strongest documented agentic coding scores in this comparison.
- Pro: Official VS Code and JetBrains integrations, covering the two editor families most professional teams standardize on.
- Pro: No dependency on a shifting Google product roadmap. Claude Code hasn’t been renamed or replaced since its 2025 rollout.
- Con: Zero free tier at any point, a real barrier for students, hobbyists, and early-stage side projects.
- Con: Rate limits on the Pro tier aren’t officially published, only estimated by third parties at roughly 45 messages per five-hour window.
- Con: The default Sonnet 5 model has no confirmed SWE-Bench Pro score, so the benchmark lead only applies if you’re paying for Opus 4.8 or Fable 5.
Gemini CLI and Antigravity CLI: Pros and Cons
- Pro: Antigravity CLI remains genuinely free for individual developers, the only zero-cost option left in this comparison.
- Pro: Cheaper API pricing across the board, at $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens for Gemini 3.1 Pro, undercutting every Claude Code model tier.
- Pro: A 1 million token context window was available even at the old free tier, well ahead of Claude Code’s 200,000 token default.
- Con: The abrupt June 18 cutoff for free individual access broke real production workflows with roughly a month of notice.
- Con: Antigravity CLI has no confirmed SWE-Bench Pro score published, making direct coding-accuracy comparisons harder to substantiate.
- Con: Migrating from Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI means learning a new closed-source tool, not applying a simple update.
The Verdict: Gemini CLI vs Claude Code in 2026
There isn’t a single winner here, and the data doesn’t support pretending there is. For budget, Antigravity CLI wins outright. It’s free where Claude Code never has been, and its Gemini 3.1 Pro API pricing at $2/$12 per million tokens beats Sonnet 5’s roughly $3/$15, Opus 4.8’s $5/$25, and Fable 5’s $10/$50 across the board. For a solo developer or a cash-conscious startup, that gap alone settles the question.
For raw agentic coding accuracy, Claude Code wins, but only if you’re paying for it. Opus 4.8’s 80.3% and Fable 5’s 80.80.3% on SWE-Bench Pro are the two officially sourced, model-specific benchmark scores in this comparison. Neither Gemini 3.1 Pro nor Claude’s own default Sonnet 5 has a published number to put next to them. If your workload is autonomous, long-running, and expensive to get wrong, that documented gap is worth the token price. If you’re doing routine day-to-day coding assistance, Sonnet 5’s flat $20-a-month Claude Pro bundle or Antigravity CLI’s free tier will cover most of what you need without the premium.
The one number that should anchor this whole decision is June 18, 2026. That’s the date Google turned a genuinely free, open-source, 100,000-star tool into an enterprise product overnight, and it’s why any comparison written before that date is now telling you about a product that no longer exists in the form it describes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Gemini CLI still free to use?
Not for individual developers. Google ended free access to Gemini CLI on June 18, 2026. It remains available at no added cost only through Antigravity CLI, or through existing Gemini Code Assist Standard and Enterprise licenses.
What replaced Gemini CLI for individual developers?
Antigravity CLI, which Google made available to everyone starting May 19, 2026. It’s a separate, closed-source tool built on Gemini 3 and Gemini 3.1 Pro, distributed as part of Google’s Antigravity 2.0 platform rather than an update to the old gemini npm package.
What model does Claude Code use by default?
Claude Sonnet 5, as of Anthropic’s June 30, 2026 Claude Code changelog update. Developers can switch to Claude Opus 4.8 or the newer Claude Fable 5 for tasks that need stronger benchmarked coding performance.
Does Claude Code have a free tier?
No. Claude Code has never offered a free tier. Access requires a Claude Pro subscription at $20 a month, Claude Max 5x at $100 a month, Claude Max 20x at $200 a month, or a metered API key.
Can I still use the original Gemini CLI at all in 2026?
Yes, but only through an enterprise license or a paid Gemini API key. The GitHub repository is still live under Apache 2.0, and Google says enterprise customers on Code Assist Standard or Enterprise licenses saw no change in access on June 18.
Is Antigravity CLI better than Claude Code for coding?
It depends on what you’re optimizing for. Antigravity CLI is cheaper and still free for individuals, but neither it nor the Gemini 3.1 Pro model behind it has a published SWE-Bench Pro score. Claude Code’s Opus 4.8 and Fable 5 tiers have officially sourced benchmark leads, at a real price premium.
Does Claude Code support MCP servers?
Yes. Claude Code supports Model Context Protocol, the same standard Gemini CLI and Antigravity CLI use, so most MCP servers built for one tool can be reconfigured to work with the other rather than rewritten from scratch.
Should I migrate from Gemini CLI to Claude Code or to Antigravity CLI?
If budget is the priority, move to Antigravity CLI, since it’s free and inherits Gemini CLI’s MCP support and context window advantages. If benchmarked coding accuracy on long, autonomous tasks matters more than cost, move to Claude Code and budget for Opus 4.8 or Fable 5 rather than staying on the default Sonnet 5 tier.
Why did Google shut down the Gemini CLI free tier instead of just keeping it running?
Google hasn’t published a detailed explanation beyond the transition announcement itself, which frames Antigravity CLI as the intended successor and a broader agent-development platform rather than a like-for-like replacement. The practical effect, whatever the internal reasoning, is that Google consolidated its coding-agent investment into one closed-source product instead of maintaining both an open-source CLI and a newer platform in parallel.
Related Coverage
- Claude Code vs Codex: 23% Higher Cost Per Task [2026]
- Antigravity vs Cursor vs Claude Code: Free vs $200 [2026]
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