Claude Code, Codex or GitHub Copilot: which one?
Three major coding agents compared on vendor, category, agent features and announced use cases, using the figures each vendor publishes.
| Compared tools | Vendor | Category | Description | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | Anthropic | Coding agents | Terminal-first (CLI) coding agent. Named a Leader by Gartner (May 2026); used by 66% of developers who use agents, per Stack Overflow 2026. | CLI, MCP |
| Codex | OpenAI | Coding agents | OpenAI's coding agent, used by more than 4 million people every week according to OpenAI (May 2026). Named a Leader by Gartner. | CLI, Cloud |
| GitHub Copilot | GitHub | Coding agents | Assistant and agent built into GitHub: 4.7M paid subscribers (+75% year over year) per Microsoft (January 2026 earnings). Used by 59% of agent users (Stack Overflow 2026). | IDE, Enterprise |