Antigravity CLI vs Claude Code: Which AI Coding CLI Should You Use in 2026?

Antigravity CLI vs Claude Code is the comparison that landed in every terminal developer's lap this year, and not by choice. On 18 June 2026 Google stopped serving Gemini CLI requests for free-tier, Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra accounts, pushing millions of individual users onto a brand-new Go binary called agy — the Antigravity CLI. Anyone who had built a workflow around Gemini CLI's famously generous 1,000-requests-per-day free tier suddenly had a decision to make: migrate to Antigravity, or pay for Claude Code.

We dug through the official documentation, pricing pages and hands-on reports for both tools. The short version: Antigravity CLI is the only serious free option left in the category, and Claude Code is still the most capable agent you can run in a terminal. Which one is right for you comes down almost entirely to whether your budget or your context window is the binding constraint.

Quick Comparison

What Actually Happened to Gemini CLI

Context matters here, because a lot of "Gemini CLI vs Claude Code" advice published before mid-2026 is now dead wrong.

Google announced the transition on 19 May 2026 and executed it a month later. The reasoning in the developer blog post is that "Gemini CLI proved the terminal could be an incredible interface for agentic tasks, but your needs shifted" toward multi-agent coordination. Antigravity CLI is the replacement: a Go rewrite sharing a single agent harness with the Antigravity 2.0 desktop app, the Antigravity IDE and the Antigravity SDK.

Two important caveats:

• Enterprise was not cut off. Gemini Code Assist Standard and Enterprise licences still work, and Gemini CLI remains accessible via paid Gemini and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform API keys.
• Feature parity is incomplete. Google's own documentation and community guides are explicit that Antigravity CLI does not have full 1:1 parity with Gemini CLI. Agent Skills, Hooks, Subagents and Extensions carried over; some workflows did not.

If you are migrating, agy plugin import gemini pulls your existing Gemini CLI extensions across, and the CLI reads both GEMINI.md and AGENTS.md for project context.

Pricing: The Real Difference

This is the headline, so let's be precise.

Antigravity CLI is included at every tier, including free, and draws from the same quota pool as the IDE and desktop app — there is no separate CLI meter or CLI fee. Paid tiers are Google AI Pro at $19.99/month, Ultra 5x at $99.99/month, and Ultra 20x at $199.99/month. Google added the $99.99 tier and cut the top tier down from $249.99 on 19 May 2026, the same day Antigravity CLI shipped.

Claude Code has no free tier at all. It starts at $20/month on Pro ($17/month billed annually), with Max 5x at $100/month and Max 20x at $200/month. Team standard seats are $25/month monthly or $20/month annual, premium seats $125/$100.

On sticker price the two ladders are nearly identical. The difference is the bottom rung: Antigravity has one and Claude Code does not.

The quota problem

Neither vendor publishes hard numbers, and both meter work rather than prompts.

Google's documentation describes access as "limited, expanded, higher and highest" across tiers, and states that baseline rate limits "are primarily determined to the degree we have capacity." Limits track the amount of work the agent performs, not prompts sent — so two identical requests can consume wildly different allowances. Free quota resets weekly; paid quota refreshes every five hours under a weekly ceiling. Unused allowance never rolls over.

Anthropic is equally vague, publishing multipliers only — Pro 1x, Max 5x, Max 20x — against a rolling five-hour session window plus a weekly cap. Crucially, Claude Code and your claude.ai conversations draw from one shared pool, so terminal work and chat compete for the same budget.

The practical difference: Claude Code's Pro tier is widely reported as workable for a full day of focused coding, whereas free-tier Antigravity users report exhausting quota in a handful of prompts. Community testing puts the free ceiling in the low tens of requests per day, down from Gemini CLI's roughly 1,000. Antigravity's parallel subagents make this worse — a single /goal can trigger ten or more model calls with no spend confirmation.

Models: Breadth vs Depth

This is where the two tools diverge philosophically.

Antigravity CLI is a multi-model harness. As of the September 2026 builds it offers Gemini 3.5/3.6/3.7 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Claude Opus 4.6 in thinking variants, and GPT-OSS-120b. It defaults to Gemini 3.5 Flash and you switch mid-session with /model. Since SDK v0.1.18 (21 September 2026) it also supports local models for offline and hybrid cloud-local orchestration.

Claude Code is Anthropic-only, and Anthropic's lineup moved fast. The current models are Claude Opus 5.5 ($4/$20 per million tokens), Claude Sonnet 5.5 ($2/$10), Claude Fable 5.1 ($10/$50) for demanding long-horizon agentic work, and Claude Haiku 4.5 ($1/$5). The first three carry 1M-token context windows with 128K max output and adaptive thinking; Haiku 4.5 sits at 200K.

Note the gap: the Claude models you can reach inside Antigravity are the 4.6 generation — two generations behind what Claude Code runs natively. If you want Opus 5.5 or Fable 5.1, Antigravity is not a route to them. The trade-off is real and it cuts in Anthropic's favour on capability, and in Google's favour on choice.

Agent Architecture

Both tools have converged on a similar shape, which makes the differences in maturity easier to see.

Antigravity CLI ships slash commands that map cleanly to intent: /goal runs autonomously to completion, /grill-me makes the agent ask clarifying questions first, /agent and /agents dispatch and monitor background subagents, /browser grants browser access for a run, and /schedule sets one-time or recurring tasks. Scheduling is a genuinely nice touch that Claude Code does not offer natively.

Three execution modes control file edits — default (approve first), accept-edits (apply automatically) and plan (plan only) — cycled with Shift+Tab or set via agy --mode=accept-edits. There is no --yolo flag; shell commands are separately governed by /permissions rules in all modes. The nuclear option is --dangerously-skip-permissions, which should only ever run in a container.

Claude Code has the deeper stack. Subagents run in their own context windows with custom system prompts, scoped tool lists and independent permissions. Agent Teams — a research-preview feature — go further, letting an orchestrator coordinate agents across separate sessions rather than within one. Skills load progressively from a SKILL.md file whose body only enters context when invoked. Plugins bundle skills, agents, hooks, MCP servers, LSP servers and monitors into shareable packages, and the LSP plugins give Claude real jump-to-definition, find-references and type-error diagnostics rather than grep-based guessing.

On MCP, both support it, but Anthropic authored the standard and Claude Code has by far the larger server ecosystem — Linear, Slack, Vercel, Sentry, Figma, Supabase and hundreds more.

Where Each One Runs

Antigravity CLI installs in one line:

curl -fsSL https://antigravity.google/cli/install.sh | bash

irm https://antigravity.google/cli/install.ps1 | iex

It is one of four surfaces on the same harness: the CLI, the Antigravity IDE, the Antigravity 2.0 desktop app with its parallel Agent Teams panel, and the SDK. Switching between terminal and IDE costs nothing extra because the quota is shared.

Claude Code spans a wider surface area for end users: terminal, VS Code and JetBrains extensions with inline diffs, a desktop app, Claude Code on the web, and mobile. One subscription covers all of them — and all of them draw from the same pool.

Real-World Performance

Hands-on reporting from late 2026 is consistent on a few points.

Claude Code still holds large, messy codebases in working memory better than the alternatives, but reviewers note the margin has narrowed sharply since mid-year — and some report more frequent errors since the Opus 5 generation landed, requiring more correction passes than the 4.x era did. It remains the default recommendation for dedicated, heavy coding work.

Antigravity's strength is ecosystem breadth rather than raw capability: Google's suite, browser integration and design tooling in one interface, with a free tier that lets you reach Gemini, Claude and GPT-family models without a credit card. The honest criticism is model capability — Google is not leading the frontier race, and Antigravity's Claude models in particular lag Anthropic's own CLI by two generations.

Which Should You Choose?

Choose Antigravity CLI if:

• You are migrating off Gemini CLI and need a free path forward
• Model choice matters more than peak model capability
• You want scheduled and recurring agent tasks out of the box
• You already work inside Google's ecosystem or the Antigravity IDE
• You need local or hybrid on-device model execution
• You are evaluating agentic coding and are not ready to pay for it

Choose Claude Code if:

• You work on large codebases where a 1M-token context window changes the job
• You need the deepest agent tooling available — Agent Teams, LSP plugins, hooks
• Predictable monthly cost matters more than a free tier
• You want the same agent in terminal, IDE, desktop, web and mobile
• You depend on MCP integrations with Linear, Sentry, Vercel, Figma or Supabase
• Anthropic model lock-in is acceptable to you

The Verdict

Antigravity CLI wins on access. It is the only major AI coding CLI in 2026 with a real free tier, and multi-model switching plus local model support gives it flexibility Claude Code structurally cannot match. The /schedule and /grill-me commands are thoughtful. For anyone displaced by the Gemini CLI shutdown, or anyone who simply cannot justify $20/month, it is the obvious landing spot — with the caveat that the free quota is small enough that serious work will push you to at least the $19.99 Pro tier.

Claude Code wins on capability. A 1M-token context window across three frontier models, the most mature agent infrastructure in the category, and the deepest MCP ecosystem add up to a tool that does more per session. If you write code professionally and your time costs more than $20/month, this is still the stronger buy.

The pragmatic answer for most developers: install Antigravity CLI first — it is free and takes one command — and use it to decide whether agentic terminal coding fits your workflow at all. If you find yourself hitting quota walls every afternoon, that is your signal that Claude Code Pro is worth the $20. Running both is also entirely reasonable: Antigravity for exploration, scheduled jobs and throwaway scripts, Claude Code for the hard multi-file work where context depth actually decides the outcome.

Pricing and quota figures verified September 2026. Both vendors have changed tiers and limits repeatedly this year — check the official pricing pages before committing.