Model rankings updated February 2026 based on real usage data.
Compare the best AI models for coding, ranked by real usage from developers on OpenRouter. Whether you're generating code, debugging, refactoring or building an AI coding assistant, these LLMs deliver strong performance across popular languages and frameworks.
This collection features top coding models from Anthropic, Google, xAI, OpenAI and more, all accessible through a single API. From agentic coding workflows to one-off code generation, find the right model for your engineering needs.
Based on top weekly usage data from millions of users accessing AI models for coding through OpenRouter.
Kimi K2.5 is Moonshot AI's native multimodal model, delivering state-of-the-art visual coding capability and a self-directed agent swarm paradigm. Built on Kimi K2 with continued pretraining over approximately 15T mixed visual and text tokens, it delivers strong performance in general reasoning, visual coding, and agentic tool-calling.
Gemini 3 Flash Preview is a high speed, high value thinking model designed for agentic workflows, multi turn chat, and coding assistance. It delivers near Pro level reasoning and tool use performance with substantially lower latency than larger Gemini variants, making it well suited for interactive development, long running agent loops, and collaborative coding tasks. Compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash, it provides broad quality improvements across reasoning, multimodal understanding, and reliability.
The model supports a 1M token context window and multimodal inputs including text, images, audio, video, and PDFs, with text output. It includes configurable reasoning via thinking levels (minimal, low, medium, high), structured output, tool use, and automatic context caching. Gemini 3 Flash Preview is optimized for users who want strong reasoning and agentic behavior without the cost or latency of full scale frontier models.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is Anthropic’s most advanced Sonnet model to date, optimized for real-world agents and coding workflows. It delivers state-of-the-art performance on coding benchmarks such as SWE-bench Verified, with improvements across system design, code security, and specification adherence. The model is designed for extended autonomous operation, maintaining task continuity across sessions and providing fact-based progress tracking.
Sonnet 4.5 also introduces stronger agentic capabilities, including improved tool orchestration, speculative parallel execution, and more efficient context and memory management. With enhanced context tracking and awareness of token usage across tool calls, it is particularly well-suited for multi-context and long-running workflows. Use cases span software engineering, cybersecurity, financial analysis, research agents, and other domains requiring sustained reasoning and tool use.
MiniMax-M2.1 is a lightweight, state-of-the-art large language model optimized for coding, agentic workflows, and modern application development. With only 10 billion activated parameters, it delivers a major jump in real-world capability while maintaining exceptional latency, scalability, and cost efficiency.
Compared to its predecessor, M2.1 delivers cleaner, more concise outputs and faster perceived response times. It shows leading multilingual coding performance across major systems and application languages, achieving 49.4% on Multi-SWE-Bench and 72.5% on SWE-Bench Multilingual, and serves as a versatile agent “brain” for IDEs, coding tools, and general-purpose assistance.
To avoid degrading this model's performance, MiniMax highly recommends preserving reasoning between turns. Learn more about using reasoning_details to pass back reasoning in our docs.
Claude Opus 4.5 is Anthropic’s frontier reasoning model optimized for complex software engineering, agentic workflows, and long-horizon computer use. It offers strong multimodal capabilities, competitive performance across real-world coding and reasoning benchmarks, and improved robustness to prompt injection. The model is designed to operate efficiently across varied effort levels, enabling developers to trade off speed, depth, and token usage depending on task requirements. It comes with a new parameter to control token efficiency, which can be accessed using the OpenRouter Verbosity parameter with low, medium, or high.
Opus 4.5 supports advanced tool use, extended context management, and coordinated multi-agent setups, making it well-suited for autonomous research, debugging, multi-step planning, and spreadsheet/browser manipulation. It delivers substantial gains in structured reasoning, execution reliability, and alignment compared to prior Opus generations, while reducing token overhead and improving performance on long-running tasks.
Grok Code Fast 1 is a speedy and economical reasoning model that excels at agentic coding. With reasoning traces visible in the response, developers can steer Grok Code for high-quality work flows.
Trinity-Large-Preview is a frontier-scale open-weight language model from Arcee, built as a 400B-parameter sparse Mixture-of-Experts with 13B active parameters per token using 4-of-256 expert routing.
It excels in creative writing, storytelling, role-play, chat scenarios, and real-time voice assistance, better than your average reasoning model usually can. But we’re also introducing some of our newer agentic performance. It was trained to navigate well in agent harnesses like OpenCode, Cline, and Kilo Code, and to handle complex toolchains and long, constraint-filled prompts.
The architecture natively supports very long context windows up to 512k tokens, with the Preview API currently served at 128k context using 8-bit quantization for practical deployment. Trinity-Large-Preview reflects Arcee’s efficiency-first design philosophy, offering a production-oriented frontier model with open weights and permissive licensing suitable for real-world applications and experimentation.
GLM-4.7 is Z.AI’s latest flagship model, featuring upgrades in two key areas: enhanced programming capabilities and more stable multi-step reasoning/execution. It demonstrates significant improvements in executing complex agent tasks while delivering more natural conversational experiences and superior front-end aesthetics.
Gemini 3 Pro is Google’s flagship frontier model for high-precision multimodal reasoning, combining strong performance across text, image, video, audio, and code with a 1M-token context window. Reasoning Details must be preserved when using multi-turn tool calling, see our docs here: https://openrouter.ai/docs/use-cases/reasoning-tokens#preserving-reasoning-blocks. It delivers state-of-the-art benchmark results in general reasoning, STEM problem solving, factual QA, and multimodal understanding, including leading scores on LMArena, GPQA Diamond, MathArena Apex, MMMU-Pro, and Video-MMMU. Interactions emphasize depth and interpretability: the model is designed to infer intent with minimal prompting and produce direct, insight-focused responses.
Built for advanced development and agentic workflows, Gemini 3 Pro provides robust tool-calling, long-horizon planning stability, and strong zero-shot generation for complex UI, visualization, and coding tasks. It excels at agentic coding (SWE-Bench Verified, Terminal-Bench 2.0), multimodal analysis, and structured long-form tasks such as research synthesis, planning, and interactive learning experiences. Suitable applications include autonomous agents, coding assistants, multimodal analytics, scientific reasoning, and high-context information processing.
GPT-5.2 is the latest frontier-grade model in the GPT-5 series, offering stronger agentic and long context perfomance compared to GPT-5.1. It uses adaptive reasoning to allocate computation dynamically, responding quickly to simple queries while spending more depth on complex tasks.
Built for broad task coverage, GPT-5.2 delivers consistent gains across math, coding, sciende, and tool calling workloads, with more coherent long-form answers and improved tool-use reliability.