Pi vs OpenAI Codex
Pi (Earendil Inc. (created by Mario Zechner)) and OpenAI Codex (OpenAI) side by side on public data, as of Oct 6, 2026.
OpenAI Codex has 4.9x the weekly package downloads of Pi (25.6M against 5.2M). Pi and OpenAI Codex are close on GitHub stars (113K and 128K). Over the last 30 days downloads moved +52% for Pi and +21% for OpenAI Codex. Pi shipped 30 stable releases in the past 90 days.
Side-by-side numbers
| Metric | Pi | OpenAI Codex |
|---|---|---|
| Pulse Score | 75 | 82 |
| Overall rank | #5 | #1 |
| Downloads, last 7 days | 5.2M | 25.6M |
| Downloads, 7-day change | up 29.8% | up 5.7% |
| Downloads, 30-day change | up 52.1% | up 21.2% |
| VS Code installs | — | 15.2M |
| Marketplace rating | — | 2.9 / 5 (725) |
| GitHub stars | 113K | 128K |
| Homebrew installs, 30 days | 6,611 | 89.7K |
| Hacker News mentions, 30 days | 50 | 1,782 |
| Latest stable release | 1.0.4 · yesterday | 0.160.1 · yesterday |
| Stable releases, 90 days | 30 | |
| Terminal-Bench (best run) | — | 58.2% · v4.0 |
| Price | Free (OSS) | Free + $8/mo |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| First released | November 2025 | April 2025 |
| Interfaces | CLI, SDK | CLI, IDE extension, Desktop, Web, Mobile, SDK |
| Models | 15+ providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Azure, Bedrock, Mistral, Groq, xAI, OpenRouter, Ollama and more) via API keys or OAuth | OpenAI GPT models (GPT-6 family per current docs) via ChatGPT sign-in or an OpenAI API key |
Trends
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
OpenAI Codex
OpenAI's coding agent, offered as an open-source terminal CLI, an IDE extension, a desktop app and a cloud agent that works on repositories. Users sign in with a ChatGPT account or use an OpenAI API key.
Pricing: Included in ChatGPT plans: Free $0, Go $8/month, Plus $20/month, Pro from $100/month ($100, $200 or $500 tiers), Business $20/user/month billed annually ($25 monthly), Enterprise and Edu by contact. API-key use is billed at API rates (no cloud features).
Latest release 0.160.1:
- Preserve SYSTEMROOT, TEMP, and TMP when launching remote stdio MCP servers with explicitly configured remote environment variables, allowing Unix hosts to retain the Windows executor's startup…
- #51121: Backport Windows remote MCP environment preservation to 0.160.