TL;DR (October 20, 2026): At $20 a month both tools give you a five-hour window, with weekly limits on top (Claude applies them on every paid plan; OpenAI says they may apply). Codex on ChatGPT Plus gets GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, and OpenAI publishes an estimate of 15 to 160 GPT-6.1 Sol messages per five hours (350 to 3,000 on Luna). Claude Code on Claude Pro gets Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5, and Anthropic publishes no message count at all. At $100, Codex Pro currently has no five-hour limit, while Claude Max 5x gives 5x Pro per session plus a weekly cap. At $200, Codex Pro $200 faces Claude Max 20x. Past the limit, both fall back to API prices: GPT-6.1 Sol is $2 / $10 per million tokens, Opus 5.5 is $4 / $20 and Sonnet 5.5 is $2 / $10.
Short verdict: at $20, Codex is the one that publishes how much you get; at $100 and up, the choice is between Codex Pro with no five-hour stop and Claude Max with Opus 5.5, where the weekly cap is what heavy users hit on both.
Codex and Claude Code are now priced the same way: a flat monthly plan that buys a rolling allowance, with API billing waiting behind it. The sticker prices line up almost exactly. What differs is what each company is willing to tell you about the allowance, which models it covers, and which limit you hit first. This page puts both plan ladders side by side as of October 2026, then works through the limits people actually run into and what each tool costs once you are paying by the token.
If you only need one side, we keep separate pages for Codex pricing and usage limits and for Claude Pro and Max pricing. This one is the head-to-head.
Plan by plan: what $0, $20, $100 and $200 buy
| Price point | Codex (ChatGPT plans) | Claude Code (Claude plans) |
|---|---|---|
| $0 | Free: GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app, subject to rollout | Free: no Claude Code (Sonnet and Haiku in chat only) |
| $8 | Go: GPT-6 Luna in the desktop app, subject to rollout | No plan at this price |
| $20 | Plus: web, CLI, IDE extension and iOS; GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna; cloud code review and Slack | Pro: $20 monthly or $17 a month billed annually ($200 up front); Opus, Sonnet and Haiku; Fable only through paid usage credits |
| $100 | Pro $100: no five-hour limit for now; weekly limits may apply | Max 5x: 5x Pro usage per session, a weekly limit across all models, Fable up to 50% of weekly limits |
| $200 | Pro $200: no five-hour limit for now; weekly limits may apply | Max 20x: 20x Pro usage per session, same weekly structure |
| $500 | Pro $500: adds Ultrafast mode | No plan at this price |
| Teams | Business: $20 per user per month billed annually, $25 monthly (2+ users) | Team Standard seat: $20 annual, $25 monthly; Premium seat: $100 annual, $125 monthly, 5x a Standard seat |
From OpenAI's Codex pricing page and Anthropic's Claude pricing page and Max plan help article, read October 20, 2026. Prices in USD, before tax.
Two details in that table matter more than they look. First, both companies share one allowance across all their surfaces: Codex usage is shared with ChatGPT Work (and ChatGPT for Excel on Plus and Pro), and Claude Code shares one pool with Claude on the web, desktop and mobile. A long chat in the browser leaves less for the terminal on both sides. Second, Claude Max includes $100 or $200 a month in API credits for the Claude Platform, but Anthropic's help center says those credits cannot be used in Claude Code or the Claude apps, including for extra usage. They are for building on the API, not for stretching your coding allowance.
How each company describes the allowance
OpenAI publishes ranges. For Plus and Standard Business it estimates local messages per five-hour window by model, and says plainly that these are estimates, not fixed limits:
| Codex model | Plus, local messages per 5 hours |
|---|---|
| GPT-6 Astra | 5 to 45 |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | 15 to 160 |
| GPT-6 Sol | 15 to 150 |
| GPT-6 Luna | 350 to 3,000 |
Cloud tasks may use more of the allowance than local messages, weekly limits may also apply, Fast mode draws included usage at 2.5x the Standard rate, and image generation uses it 3 to 5 times faster. Pro plans have no five-hour limit at the moment. The Codex pricing page does not say how the weekly allowance differs between Pro $100, $200 and $500; it points to OpenAI's help article on Pro plans for that comparison.
Anthropic publishes ratios. Claude has no message count. Its pricing page says Pro gives at least 5x the Free plan's usage per five-hour session, Max gives 5x or 20x Pro per session, and every paid plan adds weekly limits on top. The Max weekly limit applies across all models and resets at a fixed time assigned to your account, and Max also has a separate weekly limit for Fable. How far a session goes depends on conversation length, model, features and the effort level you choose. Anthropic also reserves the right to add weekly or monthly caps or limit specific models.
In practice this means you can compare Codex tiers with each other from OpenAI's numbers, but you cannot convert a Claude plan into a message count before you buy it. The only way to know is to watch /usage in Claude Code (or Settings, Usage) and /status in the Codex CLI for a week of your own work.
Which limit you hit first
On Claude Pro, it is usually the weekly limit. The five-hour window resets several times a day, the weekly one does not. Anthropic's own Claude Code guidance says Opus "uses meaningfully more of your quota" than Sonnet, and that spending Opus on routine work is the fastest way to drain a limit. Model-specific limits exist too: Claude Code can show "You've hit your Opus limit", and switching to a model outside that family with /model keeps you working. A session or weekly limit, on the other hand, is shared across all models, so switching models does not help.
This is what most of this autumn's complaints are about. In an October r/ClaudeCode post, a user building one app for eight months wrote that after the limits changed in mid-September they were running out of weekly usage in two days, and got back to a full week by planning with Opus 5.5 and executing with Sonnet 5.5, the same pattern Anthropic ships as /model opusplan. In a late-September r/ClaudeAI post, a user measured Claude Code's Prompt Suggestions feature (the greyed-out next prompt) doing a cache read of the whole context, and put the cost at up to about 10% of a weekly limit; another user measured 3 to 4%. That is a community measurement, not an Anthropic statement, but it is cheap to test on your own account.
On Codex Plus, it is usually the five-hour window, especially on GPT-6.1 Sol or GPT-6 Astra, where the low end of the estimate is 15 and 5 messages. Weekly limits "may also apply" on any plan. Codex users hit weekly walls too: a September r/codex thread titled "What is happening with Codex Pro today?" described a Pro account showing 0% weekly usage left with only Luna available.
Opinion on which is more generous swings week to week. In a late-September r/codex thread a $200 Codex subscriber argued that Opus 5.5 now beats OpenAI's models with more generous limits, and the replies were split. Treat such threads as anecdotes: both allowances move, and neither company promises they will not.
What it costs when you fall back to the API
When the plan runs out, both tools let you keep going at API prices. Claude Pro and Max users can turn on usage credits, which bill at standard API rates, or sign Claude Code in to a Console account. Codex users can buy ChatGPT credits or sign in with an API key. One trap applies to Claude Code in particular: if an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable is set, Claude Code uses it instead of your subscription, and you pay API rates without noticing. Codex with an API key loses cloud features such as GitHub code review and Slack.
Here are the list prices that apply, per million tokens:
| Model | Input | Cached input / cache read | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-6 Astra (Codex) | $10.00 | $1.00 | $50.00 |
| GPT-6.1 Sol (Codex) | $2.00 | $0.10 | $10.00 |
| GPT-6 Luna (Codex) | $0.10 | $0.01 | $0.50 |
| Fable 5.1 (Claude) | $10.00 | $0.25 | $50.00 |
| Opus 5.5 (Claude) | $4.00 | $0.20 | $20.00 |
| Sonnet 5.5 (Claude) | $2.00 | $0.10 | $10.00 |
| Haiku 5.5 (Claude, prompts up to 100K tokens) | $0.10 | $0.01 | $0.50 |
OpenAI rates are short-context Standard rates from OpenAI's API pricing page; Claude rates are from Anthropic's pricing page (5-minute cache TTL). Read October 20, 2026. Both companies charge separately for cache writes.
Coding agents resend the whole conversation on every turn, so most of their input is cache reads. Take one heavy session of 2 million cached input tokens, 200,000 fresh input tokens and 50,000 output tokens, with every request under the long-context threshold and cache writes left out:
| Model | Cached input | Fresh input | Output | Session total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-6.1 Sol | $0.20 | $0.40 | $0.50 | $1.10 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.20 | $0.40 | $0.50 | $1.10 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.40 | $0.80 | $1.00 | $2.20 |
| Fable 5.1 | $0.50 | $2.00 | $2.50 | $5.00 |
| GPT-6 Astra | $2.00 | $2.00 | $2.50 | $6.50 |
Three things fall out of this. GPT-6.1 Sol and Sonnet 5.5 have identical list rates, so on the API the mid-tier choice is about quality, not price. Opus 5.5 costs exactly twice Sonnet 5.5. And at the top, Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra share the same $10 / $50 input and output price, but Astra's cached input is $1.00 against Fable's $0.25 cache read, so on cache-heavy agent loops Astra comes out about 30% more expensive in this example.
For a sense of scale, Anthropic's Claude Code cost documentation says enterprise deployments on API billing average around $13 per developer per active day and $150 to $250 per developer per month, with 90% of users below $30 per active day. That is why the $100 and $200 plans exist: for a developer near that average, a flat plan is cheaper than the API, as long as the limits hold.
Codex credits are easy to compare with this table. Every GPT-6 rate on OpenAI's credit card is exactly 25 credits per dollar of API list price: GPT-6.1 Sol is 50 credits input and 250 output per million tokens, against $2 and $10 on the API. What a credit costs you depends on your plan or agreement, so check the purchase screen before assuming credits are cheaper than an API key. Prices for every model above move, and we log each change in the live AI price tracker.
What changed in October 2026
- GPT-5.5 left Codex on October 14, 2026 at 19:00 UTC for ChatGPT sign-in. Codex sessions that use an API key, and the API itself, are not affected.
- GPT-6.1 Sol is the model OpenAI recommends for complex coding in Codex. In ChatGPT it is available in Work and Codex, not in Chat, and it is off by default on Enterprise and Edu until an admin enables it.
- GPT-5.6 Sol keeps its promotional credit rate at least through November 21, 2026.
- Claude Code's wrap-up allowance is rolling out: when you hit a five-hour limit mid-response, Claude Code may finish the step in progress and shows "Usage limit reached · wrapping up". On Pro this applies at most once per weekly period; on Max it can apply at each five-hour limit. The extra usage counts toward your weekly limit.
- Claude Cowork is now just Claude, rolling out to Pro and Max. Every Claude surface, Claude Code included, draws on the same usage pool, so handing off more work in the apps leaves less for the terminal.
Which one to pay for
- You want the most published capacity for $20: Codex Plus on GPT-6 Luna, at an estimated 350 to 3,000 messages per five hours. Claude Pro publishes no number to compare against.
- You want a flagship model without a five-hour stop: Codex Pro has no five-hour limit for now. Claude Max still has five-hour sessions, but at 5x or 20x the Pro size.
- You want Opus-class work all week: plan with Opus 5.5 and execute with Sonnet 5.5 on Claude, or mix GPT-6.1 Sol and Luna on Codex. On both, the weekly cap is what a heavy user meets.
- You are buying for a team: the entry seat is $20 a year-billed and $25 monthly on both. The difference is what happens past the limit: workspace credits on ChatGPT Business, usage credits with spend limits per member on Claude Team.
For teams the harder question is who used what. Both vendors show a pooled or per-seat total, not cost per project or per customer. If you need that split, you have to record usage where the work starts. UsageBox meters the usage events your own tooling emits; it does not read the OpenAI or Anthropic dashboards. We cover the subscription-versus-metering trade-off in more depth in token metering vs task quotas.
Sources
Read on October 20, 2026: Anthropic's Claude pricing page; Anthropic help center articles on the Max plan, on using Claude Code with Pro or Max, and on usage and length limits; the Claude Code documentation pages on models and limits and on managing costs; OpenAI's Codex pricing page and API pricing page. Community reports are from public threads in r/codex, r/ClaudeCode and r/ClaudeAI posted in September and October 2026.