Antigravity vs Claude Code (2026): Google's $0 Agent IDE That Runs Claude vs the Terminal Agent Metered on Your Claude Plan

Antigravity vs Claude Code: the verdict up front

As of September 2026: Antigravity is the better free tool and Claude Code is the better agent, and the interesting fact is that the free tool can run Claude. Google's Antigravity is now generally available at $0 a month for individuals, with unlimited Tab completions, unlimited Command requests, weekly rate limits on the agent models, and a model menu that includes Gemini 3.8 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.6. Claude Code is Anthropic's terminal agent, included on Claude Pro from $17 a month, Max from $100, and Team seats, running the current Sonnet 5 and Opus 5 against your plan's five-hour usage pool. Pick Antigravity if you want a capable agent editor at $0 and can live with last-generation Claude and a weekly cap. Pick Claude Code if you want the current models, a terminal workflow you can gate, and a bill you already pay.

Sourcing: every Antigravity fact here is read from antigravity.google's pricing page and blog today, and every Claude number from Anthropic's pricing pages today. Two numbers Google's Antigravity page does not print, the Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscription prices, are carried from my Antigravity pricing page as reported ($20 and $249.99 a month).

What Antigravity is now that it is out of preview

When I first priced Antigravity in August it was a public preview with quotas Google kept tightening. Today the pricing page says Generally Available, and the product has grown a family: Antigravity 2.0 (the editor), an Antigravity CLI, IDE extensions announced August 20, an SDK, and custom agents announced August 12. The Individual plan is $0 with no subscription: "Unlimited Tab completions," "Unlimited Command requests," and "Basic weekly rate limits" on the agent models, which the page lists as Gemini 3.8 Flash (added September 1), Gemini 3.7 Flash, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.6, and gpt-oss-120b. Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers get "more generous rate limits" and a "flexible AI credit pool," and there is a new organization plan through Google Cloud with consumption-based pricing. The preview-era warning on my older page still applies in spirit (Google decides the limits), but the tool is no longer a beta.

What Claude Code is, and what it costs today

Claude Code is a terminal program: you run it in a repository, describe the task, and it plans, edits files, runs commands and tests, and iterates until the task is done or it needs you. It is not sold on its own. Anthropic's pricing page today includes it on Pro at $17 a month billed annually ($200 up front) or $20 monthly, on Max from $100 a month with a choice of 5x or 20x the Pro usage, and on Team and Enterprise seats, where a Premium seat at $100 a month billed annually carries 5x the usage of a standard seat. Under the hood it runs Anthropic's current models, Sonnet 5 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 output and Opus 5 at $5 / $25 if you go pay-as-you-go through the API instead. The full plan math is on Claude Code pricing.

Antigravity vs Claude Code: the comparison table

The Claude paradox: free 4.6 in Google's editor vs metered 5 in Anthropic's terminal

This is the part that makes the comparison worth writing. Antigravity lets you drive its agents with Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.6 at $0, under weekly limits. Claude Code runs Sonnet 5 and Opus 5, the generation Anthropic shipped this year, and meters them against a plan you pay for. So "Antigravity vs Claude Code" is partly "last year's Claude for free vs this year's Claude for $20." For a side project, a spike, or a founder who wants to see what an agent can do before committing, free 4.6 is a great deal. For a codebase that pays your rent, the current generation's gains on long multi-file work are real, and the five-hour pool on a Pro plan is a known quantity in a way a weekly limit Google can change is not.

What neither pricing page tells you: the limits and the math

Google's page says "basic weekly rate limits" and nothing more; it does not print the limit, and it did not print the preview-era limits either, which is how they got tightened several times without a pricing change. If Antigravity is your main tool, the number you need is not on the page; run a normal week and count how many times the agent stops. Anthropic's page is more explicit and less comfortable: every plan resets on a rolling five-hour window, paid plans add weekly limits, there is no fixed message count, and Claude Code draws from the same pool as your chats. A heavy Claude Code afternoon on Pro can exhaust the window; Max exists for exactly that person, at 5x or 20x the Pro allowance, and usage credits let a paid plan keep working past a limit at API rates. The mechanics are on Claude usage limits. The dollar math for a pay-as-you-go developer: a Sonnet 5 task that reads 200k tokens of code and writes 20k costs about $0.60; the same task on Opus 5 costs about $1.50. Multiply by your task count, compare to $20, and the plan usually wins.

Who should pick which

Pick Antigravity if: you want an agent editor at $0, you are experimenting or building a side project, or you want to try Claude's models without a Claude bill and can accept the 4.6 generation and a weekly cap. It is the best free entry in the category and, now that it is generally available, a more defensible daily tool than it was in August. The head-to-head with the other editor is on Antigravity vs Cursor.
Pick Claude Code if: you ship client or revenue work, you want the current Sonnet 5 and Opus 5, you prefer a terminal you can gate with permissions and a plan whose limits are published, or you already pay for Claude Pro, Max, or Team and the agent is free at the margin.
Run both if: you want the in-editor loop from Antigravity and the unattended refactor from Claude Code. They do not compete for the same window, and most of the working developers I know in 2026 have exactly this setup.

The part both tools leave to you

Whichever agent builds the app, the agent does not own it. The codebases that land on my desk for rescue were not written by a bad tool; they were written fast by a good one with nobody reading the diff, no tests in the loop, and secrets in the repo. Antigravity's visual diff and Claude Code's permission prompts are both helpful and neither is a review. If you have an AI-built app in production and you are not sure what is in it, the Vibe Code Rescue page starts with a free repo audit and a $7 prompt pack that makes either agent audit its own work, read-only, before anything else gets built on top.