Gemini CLI vs. Claude Code: The Ultimate AI Coding Showdown
Google just released what might be the most insane AI coding tool ever. But the number one question on everyone's mind is, does it beat the king of AI coding, Claude Code? What if I told you one of these is clearly the king of AI coding? But it's not for the reason you think. In this article, I'll put Gemini CLI and Claude Code head to head to figure out which is the best AI coding tool ever. We'll build an app side-by-side on both. You'll learn how to use each and by the end of this article, you'll know which tool is king and which you can throw away forever. Let's get into it.
The Contenders
A few days ago, Google released their Claude Code competitor, Gemini CLI. Google went full mask off. This is a complete clone of Claude Code. It works the same. It behaves the same. It looks the same. It is basically the same tool. For those who haven't been paying attention, there's a reason why they copied Claude Code so blatantly. Claude Code is by far the best AI coding tool ever. It's been taking the entire AI space by storm the last few weeks.
But here's the minor difference though, and this is where Google went savage mode. They made the first 1,000 requests every day free on Gemini CLI. With Claude Code, you can pay up to $200 a month if you're building any sort of serious app. The $17 tier is basically useless; you get like five requests. You really want to be using the $200 plan, which is pretty expensive for most people. So, the fact that Gemini CLI is free for the first thousand requests is mind-blowing. But none of that matters though if Gemini CLI stinks.
The Test
So, here's the test we're going to do. The setup involves two instances of the Cursor editor, side-by-side. On the left, we're going to load up Claude Code in Cursor. On the right, we're going to load up Gemini CLI in Cursor. We're going to give them the same app to build and we're going to see how it plays out. As each AI agent finishes their task, I'm going to immediately give them another task so we can see which one works faster.
We're going to build out a full complex stock tracking app. This isn't going to be your mama's to-do list or habit tracker or anything like that. This is going to be a complex stock tracking app to see how well these two perform. Then we're going to look at the results and we're going to rate each AI tool based on speed, accuracy, taste, and ease of use. We're going to see which tool earns your hard-earned money and which is the best.
The Showdown
So, let's do this. Let's load up both. If you haven't installed Claude Code and Gemini CLI yet, here are the commands you can just copy and paste in. Feel free to follow along with me here so that you have your own app at the end of this too that you can build out.
So, I have them both installed already. Let's just load them up.
For Claude, all you do is type in your terminal:
bash
claude
That's all loaded up and good to go. And then for Gemini, it's basically the same exact thing. We type in:
bash
gemini
And that's loaded up as well.
So, what I did was this. I went into Claude. I had it build me a prompt for a stock tracking tool that I can now just copy. And we're going to put it in both. Basically, what this prompt is going to do is build out the stock tracking tool. It's going to have a stock chart in it, the price chart. It's going to have an AI company summary. It's going to have full sentiment analysis. It's going to have a watch list in it. We're going to take this prompt, put it into both, and we're going to get to work on each to see what kind of app they build out.
So, I'm going here. We'll paste this into Claude and we'll paste this into Gemini. Uh, now let's hit enter on both and see what kind of results we get. So, here we go. Enter. Enter.
So, 0.1 second advantage to Claude Code because I hit enter on it first, but let's see what happens. So they're both—Claude Code is pontificating while Gemini CLI is planning the stock tracker. I think I prefer pontificating a little bit more. Claude Code is going in and updating a to-do list. So it's building out its to-do list for us so it can do it step by step. Gemini is just giving us the plan which it's already done. The plan is already done. "Of course I will build out a sleek AI powered stock tracking application. Here is my plan."
Claude code is still going here. So it has the front end, styling, AI integration, interactive search, dynamic price. Okay, so it's doing that and then over here Claude Code just finished. It already started writing some code and it has a to-do list. So I'll build an AI powered stock tracking app with all the features. I'm going to let it go into YOLO mode here. So it can just keep working and I will do the same with Gemini CLI.
So it looks like they're both now installing the technology behind our app. Uh, it looks like Claude Code is now flipping, which I think is their attempt at humor, which I don't mind. You know, let's make it so the AIs are fun to interact with. So, I don't hate on it. Little try-hard, but I don't hate on it. I think we're going to have two pretty cool looking apps by the end of this. It's going to be interesting to see. I'm most interested in taste. I'm most interested to see which one's going to have the better tasteful app. Which one's going to feel better to use? Which one's going to look better to use? I'm interested to see which one's better at that.
Claude code now went into implementing the stock search functionality. So it already set up the project structure in HTML foundation and created the CSS styling. So now it's implementing stock search. Both are writing out code as we speak. Uh it looks like Claude code has gone and just done the most basic HTML app possible while over on the right Gemini went with Next.js which I'd prefer. So Gemini might be in the lead a bit here so far. While Claude Code is on straight up HTML, JavaScript, CSS, which is a little old school, uh, which is interesting.
Okay, so it looks like it's ready to run. All we need to do is open index.html. So let's do that. This reminds me of my college days, just spilling out JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files. All right, let's run index.html. Let's see what we got here. Okay, this actually looks pretty nice. It's pretty clean. What happens if I—is this just going to work? Search. What's going to happen? Apple 289. Is that—is this fake data or is this real? Are we looking at real data here? Let me check my phone. I mean, we're literally, I think, a minute and a half into this. If this is real, I'm going to be very impressed. Apple. Nope. This is fake data. Uh, Apple is currently at 211. Okay, so it put in some mock data. I think what it probably needs to do next is hook up the API so that it has some real data. But this is what the UI is going to look like. And honestly, overview, market sentiment, this is pretty good from a taste perspective. This is pretty nice.
Go back in and see how both of these are working. Okay, looks like it's running. Let's boot that up and see what we got here. So, let's compare the two so far. So, this is V1. Here we go. Uh, from a looks perspective, I mean, it's comparable. I think I lean a little bit more towards the Claude Code one. From a looks perspective, let's see from a data perspective, that's accurate. 211.08. It one-shot the functionality. So 211, boom, that's the actual price of Apple at the moment. So this is accurate. That's using real data. So one-shot real data. It didn't implement the AI functionality for the summary yet or the market sentiment. But the price perspective, it had in one shot, which is pretty amazing. From a look and feel perspective, I think it's quite a bit weaker than Claude Code. Claude Code won—nicer colors, nicer feel. This one feels pretty raw, like I'm in like a Bloomberg terminal or something. V1, going to have to give the Gemini CLI the first kind of go through here. Mostly because the functionality seems to work. It's just a slight edge though because everything else I'd say is weaker, but the fact that it was able to get the price done in V1 is pretty good.
So in Claude Code, I'm going to say, "That seems to work. What are next steps?" I'm going to assume it's pulling in real data is the next step. And then in Gemini CLI, I'm going to say, "That works. The UI works, the pricing works, but there's no AI data," to see what it does from there.
Okay, so Claude Code shows the updated to-do list, which I love. I love that Claude code works this way. It works in kind of a to-do fashion where it builds and maintains its own to-do list as it goes. Uh, Gemini CLI doesn't seem to be working kind of with a to-do list. It kind of just says, "Hey, this is what we're going to work on," which I think I lean the user experience on Claude Code a little bit more in that regard. So immediate next steps it is going to implement the real-time pricing on Claude Code, give us pricing alerts, have portfolio tracking which tracks buy/sell transactions in and calculates P&L, okay, and it's going to have news integration. So Claude Code's kind of going on here and just adding a whole bunch of functionality I didn't really ask for. I don't mind it to be quite honest with you, but it's something to note. Gemini CLI on the other end says, "Now let's bring in the AI features." So, it's sticking exactly to what I'm asking for. So, it's going to pull in the company summary and add the AI features. So, they're both going off.
So far, Claude Code seems to have more of a mind of its own, like it's a human being, and it's adding other features it finds interesting, which I don't absolutely love, but to be honest with you, I don't hate. And over on the right hand side, Gemini CLI seems to be sticking to exactly what we're doing.
Note: It's very important just as a tip for each of these here. As you're using Claude, as you're using Gemini CLI, the higher the quality your first prompt, the better they're both going to work and the more time you'll save in the back end. If you spend a lot more time in the front end building out really good prompts like we did here, you're going to be able to save a lot more time and you don't need to handhold the AI every step of the way. You just need to approve the next steps. But if you have kind of a sloppy prompt up front, you're going to have to do a lot more handholding and fixing of errors.
Okay, so both have finished what they were doing. Let's see where we're at. Okay, it looks improved. Okay, so we have now a set alert button. We can get alerts when we go above or below a certain price. I didn't ask for that but that's still kind of cool it thought of that. I kind of wish it would focus on the core features first before adding all these extra features but that's fine. The company overview has the real-time news. The market sentiment shows mixed signals and a balanced wait-and-see approach. That's not really telling me anything, but it looks good, which counts for something. It does not look like the price is real time yet, though. It still looks like it is mock data. Yep. So, it's switching every time I click it. So, did not figure out the real data yet, but it looks really nice.
Let's go over to Google CLI and see what they got over here. Okay, the chart looks nicer now. About Apple, it's got the real-time news. Market sentiment is somewhat bullish, which doesn't really mean anything. And the watch list, can we add other stocks to the watch list? Yes. Okay. So, it has the real-time stocks from the watch list, which is pretty cool. And the chart looks pretty nice as well. I mean, out of all the things requested, really the only thing this Gemini CLI is missing is an explanation on market sentiment.
So far through two prompts here, Claude Code's looking really good and they're adding a bunch of features. They haven't really done the core of what we're looking for yet. Gemini CLI, on the other hand, is going just straight to what we asked for. It's not really adding any of the window dressings or like things that make apps fun or interesting to use. Like this is as plain Jane as it gets, but it's doing what we asked for, which is really helpful and nice.
So, so far I'm seeing this in this competition. Claude Code seems to be building better code. The app looks nicer. It looks more modern. It looks more usable. It seems like it's able to come up with context on its own and like it's able to do more than you ask. It did extra things like make this look pretty, make the chart look nice, use nice looking colors. I like that it kind of has a brain and a taste of its own. The Gemini CLI side, it's doing what we're asking very well, but it's not doing it in a way where this is appealing. No one would use this app because it's very ugly and simple. There's no taste to it. It doesn't feel like it has its own brain. It feels like it's just doing what I'm telling it to do, which don't get me wrong, it's not necessarily a negative thing. From a functionality perspective, it seems like a step ahead of Claude. But so far, I think I prefer what Claude's building a little bit more.
And over on the Claude side, let's test out the real-time pricing to see if they finally got that. So I'm going to refresh here. I'm going to type in a stock, Google. It's going to load the stock data 178. Let's see if that's the real time price. 178. So that's accurate. It has the real-time data. That's awesome. Can we add that to watch list? Yep. And it has the real chart there. Let's see if we can get Apple to update. Yep, it has the real Apple chart. It updated. There we go. Okay, so now the functionality works here. So now it's caught up to Gemini CLI. It just took one extra command to make it catch up from a functionality perspective. But again, from a usability perspective, I like this a lot more.
That looks great. What are next steps? Oh, and while I'm doing that, it says Gemini has completed phase one and phase two. So, usability should be improved and it should have better AI analysis. Let's see what we got here.
Okay, so looks like we have our first bug. Gemini messed up. It's not loading and we got an error. So, let's give this back to Gemini and see what we got here. One of the great things about Claude Code I've been seeing over the last few weeks is it does not mess up. Out of the hours and hours and hours I've spent in Claude Code, I haven't gone down a single error rabbit hole, which is amazing. Looks like Gemini got some errors. So, let's just put that in. "Got an error" and I paste it in. This is what you do when working with your AIs, by the way. You get errors, you keep it simple. "Hey, got an error." You copy and paste the error from the console and it should be able to fix it for you.
So, as Gemini is fixing that, we are at this point Claude has done pretty much what we asked. The market sentiment analysis isn't great. Let's test the kind of taste a little bit more with Claude Code and let's just see what it wants to build next and kind of give it a little bit of freedom to add a couple features.
I asked Claude Code what it wants to add next. It wants to add portfolio tracking, advanced technical indicators, and user authentication. So let's do this. Let's take a couple of these and have it just build it out. "Can you please add the technical indicators and news feed?" So I took a couple of things it came up with. I said just feel free to add that. We'll leave this as last steps of Claude Code.
And then on the Gemini side, we will try to see what is going on here. Okay, so it says "I've corrected the error." Let's pull it open. Uh does not appear like it corrected the error. Looks like we're still getting errors here. So we're in our first rabbit hole here. Let's take this error and paste it in. To Claude's credit, it did not get any errors. More errors. I paste in the errors to Gemini. I say, "Go at it. Let's fix it."
Claude Code's building out its other functionality that it kind of just came up with on the fly. We already met the requirements on Claude Code. Now, it's just building out extra stuff. It's just styling on us now, while Gemini is trying to fix. While Gemini did get to the basic functionality quicker, it wasn't as pleasant of an experience. Now we're running into errors, unfortunately.
All right, Gemini says it fixed. Let's see what we got here. Let's refresh. Oh, it almost showed something. Now we're getting more errors. "Uncaught reference: dates is not defined." All right, we're getting a little fed up with Gemini here. Claude code just doesn't do error rabbit holes. Funny because a lot of people say Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best coding model out there. It seems to be very highly intelligent like as we kind of saw it was able to get to the final results quick but it seems to be kind of un-ironed out. Claude Code's very ironed out, dependable, reliable, which I think is very important. Gemini is not very reliable. "You're right my apologies I introduced a reference error at my last fix." Okay so this is your full-on rabbit hole here.
And over here, Claude Code finished with its bonus features. So, let's see. So, I'm going to refresh here. Let's put in Tesla. Okay, so we got Tesla. Let's see what we got here. We got technical indicators. So, it has the RSI, the MACD, the Bollinger bands. That's pretty good. Latest news. Okay, so this is fake data. I'm sure this is fake data because it didn't actually implement the API yet. I'm sure I have to put in like an API key, but it has the features built out. And just like the real-time pricing, probably all I need to do to get that to work is put in an API key.
So, let's look at what Claude Code has for us so far. It has, I think you'd probably agree reading this article, the best UX, the best UI. This is nice. This is an app I would use every day. The watch list looks great. It has little taste features like the hover state. You hover over things, it looks nice. I click it, it loads it in. Boom. It updates the price. Nice. It has the color coding. The colors are nice. It has the overview, which is good. It has technical indicators, which is cool. That's just bonus features it came up with. And the latest news, and I'm sure I just put in an API key and it'll get the latest news. So, this is good. This is clearly like Claude understands human beings and made like a very human-specific app. Was it as fast as Gemini? It took a little bit to get to that baseline usage, but it eventually got there.
Gemini. Let's see what we got going on in Gemini. So, it finished. Let's see what we got here. More "failed to fetch data." Let's see what happens if I put in a stock here. Nope. Failed to fetch. So, we've run into a full-on rabbit hole of errors with Gemini. And to be honest, this is kind of predictable using both models. I've used both models a ton. There was a lot of hype when Gemini 2.5 Pro came out. People were saying, "Oh, it's the smartest ever." You know what? It is pretty damn smart. But to be honest with you, it's just kind of unpredictable and unfocused. It runs into errors. It doesn't know when to use tools. It'll do things that blow you away, like it kind of one-shot the basic functionality of the app, but the moment we started trying to change anything, it tripped over itself.
The Final Verdict
So, let's do this. Let's score these and determine the winner. We'll rate them all one to 10 in each one of these categories.
Claude Code: - Speed: 7/10 (A little slower, but good speed.) - Accuracy: 9/10 (Zero bugs, very focused.) - Taste: 10/10 (Fantastic taste, beautiful and pleasant to use.) - Ease of Use: 7/10 (Easy to use, but required a little more guidance.) - Total: 33/40
Gemini CLI: - Speed: 8/10 (Slightly faster.) - Accuracy: 6/10 (Got the core functionality done faster, but ran into many bugs.) - Taste: 5/10 (Ugly, not motivating to use.) - Ease of Use: 8/10 (A little easier, implemented APIs without being asked.) - Total: 27/40
Conclusion
This backs up my experiences with both. Gemini CLI is an amazing tool and if Claude Code did not exist, Gemini CLI would be blowing minds. But Claude Code just seems a little bit more humanlike, more lifelike, a little bit more intelligent. It just seems to operate like a human. Gemini CLI, it does pretty incredible things, but every once in a while it just goes off the rails a little bit and messes up, which was what my experience was with Gemini 2.5 Pro.
Here's what it comes down to. If you're tight on budget, Gemini CLI is pretty amazing for its cost, which is free for the first thousand requests. So, if you don't have money to spend, here's what I would do. I'd go out, I'd use Gemini CLI. I'd build your first app. I'd put it online. I'd start making money. You start making money with your app on Gemini CLI and then you take that money and then you get on the $200 a month Claude Code. If you have extra money, you invest in yourself and you go straight to Claude Code.
But what Google did with Gemini CLI is amazing making it free. The more competition, the better it is for all of us. Claude Code though does appear smarter, does appear more focused and just has better taste overall. The apps that come out of Claude Code just feel like better apps, more usable apps, and this does back up my personal experiences using both for hours and hours.
