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-M2.5 is a SOTA large language model designed for real-world productivity. Trained in a diverse range of complex real-world digital working environments, M2.5 builds upon the coding expertise of M2.1 to extend into general office work, reaching fluency in generating and operating Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files, context switching between diverse software environments, and working across different agent and human teams. Scoring 80.2% on SWE-Bench Verified, 51.3% on Multi-SWE-Bench, and 76.3% on BrowseComp, M2.5 is also more token efficient than previous generations, having been trained to optimize its actions and output through planning.
Opus 4.6 is Anthropic’s strongest model for coding and long-running professional tasks. It is built for agents that operate across entire workflows rather than single prompts, making it especially effective for large codebases, complex refactors, and multi-step debugging that unfolds over time. The model shows deeper contextual understanding, stronger problem decomposition, and greater reliability on hard engineering tasks than prior generations.
Beyond coding, Opus 4.6 excels at sustained knowledge work. It produces near-production-ready documents, plans, and analyses in a single pass, and maintains coherence across very long outputs and extended sessions. This makes it a strong default for tasks that require persistence, judgment, and follow-through, such as technical design, migration planning, and end-to-end project execution.
For users upgrading from earlier Opus versions, see our official migration guide here
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.
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.
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.
GLM-5 is Z.ai’s flagship open-source foundation model engineered for complex systems design and long-horizon agent workflows. Built for expert developers, it delivers production-grade performance on large-scale programming tasks, rivaling leading closed-source models. With advanced agentic planning, deep backend reasoning, and iterative self-correction, GLM-5 moves beyond code generation to full-system construction and autonomous execution.
Pony is a cutting-edge foundation model with strong performance in coding, agentic workflows, reasoning, and roleplay, making it well suited for hands-on coding and real-world use.
Note: All prompts and completions for this model are logged by the provider and may be used to improve the model.