Gemini CLI vs Pi
Gemini CLI (Google) and Pi (Earendil Inc. (created by Mario Zechner)) side by side on public data, as of Oct 6, 2026.
Pi has 11.5x the weekly package downloads of Gemini CLI (5.2M against 453K). Gemini CLI and Pi are close on GitHub stars (107K and 113K). Over the last 30 days downloads moved +2% for Gemini CLI and +52% for Pi. Pi shipped 30 stable releases in the past 90 days.
Side-by-side numbers
| Metric | Gemini CLI | Pi |
|---|---|---|
| Pulse Score | 57 | 75 |
| Overall rank | #24 | #5 |
| Downloads, last 7 days | 453K | 5.2M |
| Downloads, 7-day change | up 4.7% | up 29.8% |
| Downloads, 30-day change | up 1.8% | up 52.1% |
| VS Code installs | 1.1M | — |
| Marketplace rating | 4.1 / 5 (21) | — |
| GitHub stars | 107K | 113K |
| Homebrew installs, 30 days | 2,855 | 6,611 |
| Hacker News mentions, 30 days | 28 | 50 |
| Latest stable release | 0.62.0 · 7d ago | 1.0.4 · yesterday |
| Stable releases, 90 days | 30 | |
| Terminal-Bench (best run) | 65.8% · v2.1 | — |
| Price | Varies | Free (OSS) |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| First released | June 2025 | November 2025 |
| Interfaces | CLI, IDE extension | CLI, SDK |
| Models | Google Gemini models (Gemini 3 per site) via a Gemini/Vertex AI API key or a Code Assist license | 15+ providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Azure, Bedrock, Mistral, Groq, xAI, OpenRouter, Ollama and more) via API keys or OAuth |
Trends
Gemini CLI
Google's open-source terminal agent that brings Gemini models to the command line for code editing, shell commands and MCP tools. Since 2026-06-18 it no longer serves free, Google AI Pro/Ultra or Google One users, who were moved to Antigravity CLI.
Pricing: As of 2026-06-18 the free Code Assist for individuals tier and Google AI Pro/Ultra access ended; Gemini CLI continues with paid Gemini/Vertex API keys (pay as you go) and Gemini Code Assist Standard/Enterprise licenses (1,500/2,000 requests per user per day per the quota docs). Antigravity CLI is free to everyone.
Latest release 0.62.0:
- fix(a2a-server): add early return on unsupported store in tasks metadata endpoint
- Changelog for v0.61.0-preview.0
- Changelog for v0.60.0
- fix(core,acp): format MCP tool call titles as structured signatures and segregate explanations
Pi
Minimal, extensible open-source coding agent harness with interactive TUI, print/JSON, RPC and SDK modes, created by Mario Zechner and now maintained by Earendil Inc. It supports 15+ model providers through API keys or OAuth and is customized with TypeScript extensions, skills and packages.
Pricing: Free and MIT-licensed; costs are those of the chosen model provider. Pi Durable (experimental) is also free per the 1.0 announcement.
Latest release 1.0.4:
- Tool patterns and --no-mcp: --tools and --exclude-tools accept patterns, for example --tools read,codemode,'mcpradius' keeps only one MCP server's tools. --tools now keeps MCP tools unless an…
- Codemode persists images: tools.read() on an image file now gives back an image block that image() can show. See Call tools.
- Added patterns to --tools and --exclude-tools, for example --tools read,codemode,'mcpradius'
- Added --no-mcp to disable the built-in MCP support for one run