AidervsClaude Code
Generated from the two spec rows. Green marks the better value where a spec has a clear direction. Everything else is just different.
Aider
Aider AI (Paul Gauthier) · Terminal agent
#7OSS
Panel
7.14 spec wins
- Reliability
- 7.2
- Usefulness
- 6.8
- Cost
- 7.5
- Longevity
- 7.0
“Commits every change to git so you can see exactly which one broke the build.”
Claude Code
Anthropic · Terminal agent
#3MCP
Panel
7.05 spec wins
- Reliability
- 7.2
- Usefulness
- 8.0
- Cost
- 5.5
- Longevity
- 7.2
“Included with Pro at $20, which is how you learn what the Max plan is for.”
Spec by spec
| Spec | Aider | Claude Code |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| Category | Terminal agent | Terminal agent |
| Runs | local | local, cloud |
| Platforms | macos, linux, windows | macos, linux, windows |
| Context window | not documented | 200k tokens, 1M on select models |
| Protocols | ||
| MCP client | No | Yes |
| MCP server | No | Yes |
| Capabilities | ||
| Runs terminal commands | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-file edits | Yes | Yes |
| Git operations | Yes | Yes |
| Browser control | YesThe /web command and URL detection drive a real Chromium through Playwright to render and read pages (--disable-playwright turns it off); the --browser flag is only aider's own Streamlit GUI. | Yes |
| Sandboxed execution | NoAider publishes a Docker image as an install option only; commands it runs are not sandboxed. | Yes |
| Multi-agent orchestration | No | Yes |
| Headless / CI mode | Yes | Yes |
| Models | ||
| Backbone | OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Bedrock, Vertex AI, Azure, Groq, xAI, Ollama, LM Studio | Claude |
| Bring your own model | Yes | YesThrough Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud's Agent Platform, Microsoft Foundry, or any LLM gateway your organisation runs, with model IDs pinned per deployment. |
| Local models | Yes | NoClaude Code routes only to Claude models. Anthropic states it does not support routing Claude Code to non-Claude models through any gateway, and gateway model discovery drops every model ID that does not contain "claude" or "anthropic", so a local Ollama or LM Studio endpoint is not a supported setup. |
| Cost | ||
| Pricing model | byok | mixed |
| Starts at | $0/mo | $20/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | No |
| Bring your own key | Yes | YesYour own Anthropic API key, or your own AWS, Google Cloud or Azure account. |
| Openness | ||
| Open source | Yes | No |
| License | Apache-2.0 | proprietary |
| GitHub stars | 49,324 | 148,889 |
Which one would each critic pick
| Critic | Aider | Claude Code | Pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Juez | — | — | not enough reviews |
| El Amigo | 7.5 | 7.8 | Claude Code — Use it if you live in the terminal and can pay for Max or an API key; it is the strongest terminal agent here for real repositories. |
| El Crítico | 7.3 | 6.8 | Aider — Every edit is a real edit on your disk with no sandbox, and auto-commit is the one mitigation standing between a bad command and your afternoon. |
| El Profesor | 8.3 | 6.8 | Aider — The most legible architecture on the board, with a published harness; the SWE-bench numbers are from 2024 and should be read as history, not as a claim. |
| La Inversora | 5.3 | 8.5 | Claude Code — Anthropic owns the model, the distribution and the invoice, which is the rarest kind of moat in this category. |
| La Jefa | 5.5 | 7.0 | Claude Code — Team seats at $20 with SSO, Enterprise for audit logs; the metered part is what sixty engineers on agentic tasks will actually cost. |
| El Hacker | 9.0 | 5.0 | Aider — Python I can read, prompts in the repo, .aider.conf.yml for model and edit format, --model ollama/anything for an air-gapped box; MCP is the one gap. |
Picks are derived from each critic's own scores. Humans vote on matchups on the duels page.