Claude Code vs OpenAI Codex CLI

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

	Claude Code Anthropic's official agentic CLI; plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, subagents.	OpenAI Codex CLI OpenAI's official terminal coding agent; adopts the SKILL.md standard.
Category	harness	harness
Vendor type	commercial	open source
Pricing	subscription	freemium
Strengths	+ Mature primitives (skills, hooks, plugins, MCP, subagents) + Official Anthropic-supported harness + Strong ecosystem of community plugins/marketplaces	+ Adopts cross-vendor SKILL.md standard + Open source + Native OpenAI Responses API integration
Tradeoffs	− Terminal-first UX may not fit non-engineer users	− Smaller plugin ecosystem than Claude Code
Used in stacks	4	0