Claude Code vs Devin

Claude Code

Claude Code is the reference point for terminal-first coding agents: it works from a plain shell, reaches into every editor and chat surface Anthropic ships, and its extension points (MCP, hooks, skills, subagents) are deep enough that teams build their own workflows on it. The buying decision is really about usage: Pro is enough to try it, but sustained agentic work eats the shared five-hour and weekly limits fast, and the realistic budgets are Max at $100-200 or per-token Console billing. Skip it if you want an autocomplete pane or cannot let an agent run commands in your repo.

Pros

• +One engine across terminal, VS Code, JetBrains, desktop, web, mobile, GitHub, GitLab and Slack, sharing CLAUDE.md, settings and MCP servers
• +Extension points for real customisation: MCP servers, hooks, skills, plugins, parallel subagents and an Agent SDK
• +Auto mode with checks on risky commands, scheduled routines and cloud sessions that keep running when the laptop is closed
• +Included in every paid Claude plan from $17/month, with Max tiers bundling API credits

Cons

• −No free tier, and the Free plan explicitly excludes it
• −Usage comes out of the same rolling five-hour and weekly limits as chat, so heavy sessions hit the ceiling on Pro
• −Running it at scale means Max at $100-200 a month or per-token API spend that is hard to forecast
• −IDE extensions and the Linux desktop app still carry beta labels

Devin

Devin is the agent to hand a whole ticket to and walk away from, and the $20 Pro tier makes that affordable to try for the first time. The quota is the catch: a long autonomous session can exhaust a plan quickly, and once it does you are paying API rates, so it suits teams that batch well-scoped tasks rather than developers who want a tireless pair programmer in the loop.

Pros

• +End-to-end autonomy: plans, codes, tests and opens the pull request from its own cloud machine
• +Fans one large task out across parallel agents and manages them itself
• +Native Slack, Linear, Jira and GitHub integration plus Desktop and CLI clients
• +Entry price dropped to $20 a month, far below the original enterprise-only positioning

Cons

• −Quotas are described only qualitatively ('light', 'generous'), so cost per task is hard to predict
• −Overage is billed at API pricing, which is where a runaway agent session gets expensive
• −Team tier adds a flat $80 a month on top of $40 per full user
• −Pages are heavily client-rendered; the terms live on cognition.com, not devin.ai

Is Claude Code cheaper than Devin?

On published entry prices, Claude Code starts lower — $17/mo against $20/mo for Devin. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it; what each plan includes differs.

Does Claude Code or Devin have a free tier?

Devin has a free tier; Claude Code has paid plans only.

Which has a public API, Claude Code or Devin?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.