Choose Codex for OpenAI's coding agent in a CLI, an IDE extension, the ChatGPT desktop app and cloud tasks, included with ChatGPT plans; choose Copilot for completions, chat and agents in your editors. They overlap: Copilot's paid plans can run Codex as a coding agent on GitHub.[1][2][3][4][5]
Zest reads each engineer's Codex and GitHub Copilot Chat sessions (model, tokens, skills and MCP tools), joins them to the pull requests they led to, and shows both side by side. One workspace price: 5 engineers pay $49/mo on Pro.
Measure both with Zest:
Codex and GitHub Copilot Chat sessions side by side, per engineer
The model, skills and MCP tools behind each session
Claude CodeFable 5.1 (max) (with fallback)70.4 · Coding Agent Index
CodexGPT-6 Astra (max)67.0 · Coding Agent Index
Muse CodeMuse Spark 1.3 (xhigh)64.2 · Coding Agent Index
Grok BuildGrok 4.5 (high)64.1 · Coding Agent Index
Kimi Code CLIKimi K362.6 · Coding Agent Index
OpencodeGemini 3.8 Flash (high)61.2 · Coding Agent Index
Cursor CLIComposer 2.5 Fast38.3 · Coding Agent Index
Demo setups use current model families. The pairings above are the combinations benchmarked by Artificial Analysis; rankings measure performance, not popularity.
Illustrative daily trends · Other totals: last 30 days. Build Hours: this week, model-estimated activity including overlap; not engineer hours.
USED BY ENGINEERING TEAMS AT
AT A GLANCE
Codex vs GitHub Copilot, side by side
What each tool documents, row by row.
Codex vs GitHub Copilot, side by side
Codex
GitHub Copilot
Team seats for 5 engineers
$100/mo — ChatGPT Business at $20 a seat, billed annually ($25 monthly).[2]
$95/mo — Copilot Business at $19 a seat, with 1,900 pooled AI credits.[4]
Where it runs
Codex CLI, an IDE extension (VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf), the ChatGPT desktop app, Codex Cloud and @codex review on GitHub.[1]
Agent mode in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode and Eclipse; the Copilot CLI and app; a cloud agent on GitHub.[3]
Models
OpenAI GPT models; local clients can point at a custom Responses-API provider such as Ollama.[6][7]
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI (Grok) and other vendors' models, picked per chat.[8]
Project instructions
AGENTS.md (global ~/.codex, then repo root down to the working directory) and AGENTS.override.md.[9]
.github/copilot-instructions.md and .github/instructions; AGENTS.md in VS Code chat, and AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md in the cloud agent and CLI.[10]
Skills, subagents and hooks
Skills in .agents/skills (the Agent Skills standard), custom agents and subagents, and hooks.[11]
Agent skills (.github, .claude or .agents skills), custom agents, prompt files and hooks.[12]
MCP servers
STDIO and Streamable HTTP MCP servers in config.toml, from the app, CLI and IDE extension.[13]
In IDEs, the CLI, the app and the cloud agent; for Business and Enterprise the MCP policy is off by default.[14]
Team analytics, built in
Workspace analytics of messages, credits and active users; a Codex dashboard and Analytics API on Enterprise.[15][16]
A 28-day usage metrics dashboard, code generation and impact dashboards, and a per-user REST API.[17]
Checking your own usage
A usage dashboard with limits and reset times; /status and /usage daily, weekly or cumulative in the CLI.[2][18]
Copilot settings show usage this cycle in AI credits; the Copilot CLI's /usage shows tokens and credits per model.[19]
Each tool's column is read from its vendor's own docs and pricing page, dated in the sources below.
Codex or GitHub Copilot: which one fits your team
Pick Codex if your team pays for ChatGPT, since Plus, Pro and Business include it, and wants an agent that takes whole tasks: in the terminal, in VS Code, Cursor or JetBrains through its extension, in the ChatGPT desktop app, or as cloud tasks with @codex review on GitHub. It runs OpenAI's GPT models, metered in five-hour and weekly windows.
Pick Copilot if AI inside every editor comes first. One Copilot seat covers three different things: inline completions and next edit suggestions as you type, which stay unlimited on paid plans and aren't billed in AI credits; chat and agent mode in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode and Eclipse; and the cloud agent, which works on GitHub and opens a pull request. Agent work draws on AI credits, which a Business seat adds to one organization pool.
The two meet in the agent. Copilot's paid plans can assign work to OpenAI Codex as a third-party coding agent on GitHub, in public preview, with GPT-5.x models rather than GPT-6, using Actions minutes and AI credits. So the choice is really whether your agent work runs on a ChatGPT plan or on Copilot seats.
Codex vs GitHub Copilot pricing and limits
Codex and GitHub Copilot, from each vendor's pricing page in October 2026:
Codex comes with ChatGPT Plus at $20 a month, Pro from $100 and Business at $25 per user ($20 billed yearly), and Free and Go ($8) run GPT-6 Luna in the desktop app. On Plus and Standard Business, OpenAI estimates 5–45 local messages per five hours on GPT-6 Astra, 15–160 on GPT-6.1 Sol and 350–3,000 on GPT-6 Luna. More on Codex pricing.
Copilot Business is $19 a seat, with 1,900 pooled AI credits.
What our own team can tell you
Codex wrote 31 of the 866 agent-written pull requests merged in our two repos from August 12 to October 4, 2026, and Copilot wrote none, so we can't compare the two on our own work. What we can say about Codex alone is on Codex usage: its share of our merged pull requests rose to 9.9% in the 30 days to October 3, and on one engineer's laptop its weekly limit reached 100% on 7 days in September.
Running Codex and GitHub Copilot on one repository
Codex's extension installs in VS Code next to Copilot, and Copilot Pro+ and Max subscribers can sign in to it with Copilot. Keep shared instructions in AGENTS.md: Codex reads it from your home folder down to the working directory, and Copilot reads it in VS Code chat, its cloud agent and its CLI. Put skills in .agents/skills, where both load them.
TRY IT ON YOUR TEAM
See what your team ships with AI.
Starter is free (3 seats, no credit card). Pro is $49 a month with 5 seats and Max is $149 a month with 10 seats — priced per workspace, not per engineer, with extra seats at $19 a month.
Is GitHub Copilot's coding agent the same as Codex?+
No. The Copilot cloud agent is GitHub's own agent, included on paid plans, which works on an issue and opens a pull request. OpenAI Codex is a separate agent that Copilot can also run on GitHub, in public preview, alongside Anthropic's Claude.
Does Zest capture Copilot inline completions?+
No. Zest reads Copilot Chat sessions in VS Code and each Codex session from the Codex plugin: models, tokens, skills and tools. For completion acceptance, GitHub's Copilot metrics stay the source.
Winding / Teams
