Leaderboard for AI Terminal-based agents
14 Jan 2026TL;DR: I’ve created a daily updated AI terminal coding agent leaderboard (i.e. Claude Code and its competition), ranking popularity based on monthly downloads. It lives on https://terminalai.forret.com/.
AI Terminal Coding Agents
I have been a very enthusiastic user of Claude Code for about 6 months now. It is really getting better by the day. Its skills and insights are way beyond a junior programmer now. I’ve also dabbled with Gemini CLI and Codex CLI, and even JetBrains’ Junie. Using a coding agent in a CLI setting really works for me. I’ve even set up a TailScale/Termius connection on my phone to work from literally anywhere.
terminalai.forret.com
I did read about other AI agents like Cline, Qodo, Amp and Goose, since I develop a popular JetBrains plugin for running all these CLI coding agents in PHPStorm/IntelliJ/PyCharm. So now I’ve made a leaderboard website to rank all these CLI terminal-based coding agents based on monthly installs. This is a Laravel 12 project, that gets data from NPM, PyPi, GitHub and does some analysis on the actual packages. Stats are updated on a daily basis.
Check it out on terminalai.forret.com
Some findings
- Claude Code leads by a big margin. It currently gets 10 times the monthly installs of the number 2. 17 million every month, for a very nerdy product.
- Codex CLI and Gemini CLI are in the same ballpark, both around 1.5 million installs/month.
- Copilot and Aider are in the next group, those with between 200K and 250K installs in a month. I was unaware of Aider before I started this side-project.
- Grok CLI is not in the same league. They don’t really compare with only 9K installs per month.
NPM as a wrapper
- The largest package is 370MB large. The smallest is 720KB. I still have to investigate properly how that is even possible.
- Some NPM packages like Gemini CLI have dependencies (through its
package.jsonfile) and almost 2000 files. That seems normal. Other packages have only 20 files and no dependencies, just 1 huge .js file. Probably a minified compilation from TypeScript. I also want to investigate that. - a lot of the packages have a bundled copy of ripgrep: ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore.
