Codex passed Claude Code on npm in May 2026, lost the lead twice more over the summer, then took it back for good on 24 August. It has led every week since, and the gap just widened again.
Week of 2 November 2026 (the latest complete week, api.npmjs.org, fetched 12 November 2026): Codex pulled 25,908,100 npm downloads. Claude Code pulled 14,193,546. Codex is ahead by 1.83x.
That gap keeps moving in the same direction. On 8 September it was 3%. On 27 September it was 1.7x. Six weeks later it's 1.83x.
What the chart leaves out#
Neither tool's npm number is its real usage. Anthropic's own installer, not npm, is now the documented way to install Claude Code, and every developer who follows that advice disappears from this chart. Codex can also be installed outside npm. Anthropic is the one actively steering people off the registry, so this chart likely overstates Codex's gap rather than understates it.
What it does show cleanly: which tool is growing faster where it's still measurable. Codex went from 2.7 million npm downloads a week in March to 25.9 million now, about 9.6x in eight months. Claude Code roughly held its range over the same stretch.
The other eight#
Standings as of the rolling week ending 11 November 2026 (api.npmjs.org, fetched 12 November 2026):
| Package | Agent | Downloads, last 7 days |
|---|---|---|
@openai/codex | Codex | 26,234,083 |
@anthropic-ai/claude-code | Claude Code | 16,254,401 |
opencode-ai | OpenCode | 3,417,818 |
@github/copilot | GitHub Copilot CLI | 1,810,299 |
@google/gemini-cli | Gemini CLI | 435,289 |
@qwen-code/qwen-code | Qwen Code | 178,000 |
@sourcegraph/amp | Amp | 26,907 |
@continuedev/cli | Continue CLI | 6,452 |
@vibe-kit/grok-cli | Grok CLI | 1,889 |
cursor-agent | Cursor Agent | 260 |
OpenCode is the one to watch. It wasn't close to this list a year ago and now pulls more weekly downloads than every agent except the top two combined.
Methodology#
Daily download counts came from the public api.npmjs.org/downloads/range endpoint for each package above, fetched 12 November 2026, summed into ISO weeks (Monday start). Full daily history: @anthropic-ai/claude-code and @openai/codex, 24 February 2025 through 9 November 2026.
One correction was necessary. Codex's daily downloads jumped from roughly 900,000 to 13.4 million on 30 April 2026, peaked at 45.98 million on 2 May, and fell back to 846,237 by 7 May. A single day, 11 May, spiked to 7.86 million against neighboring days near 900,000. Both patterns match a scraper or CI cache-buster hitting the registry, not developer adoption, and the first one is the same spike Anwar flagged in his original npm-race post. Both windows were replaced with 890,213 downloads/day, the median of the ten nearest normal days, before weekly totals were computed. Every other number in this report is the figure the API returned, unmodified.
ObserveOne, "Claude Code vs Codex: npm Downloads, Updated Weekly," fetched 12 November 2026. Full weekly dataset (CSV): npm-race-claude-code-vs-codex.csv. Source: api.npmjs.org.
Why ObserveOne tracks this#
Every one of these tools writes code faster than a human reviews it. We don't care which one wins the npm race. We care that whatever an agent just pushed still works when a customer clicks checkout, which is why we built ObserveOne as a testing layer for AI-written code rather than another agent. If your team ships with Claude Code, Codex, or anything in the table above and nobody's testing the critical paths, that's the gap we close.