Plandex: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What Plandex does

Plandex belongs to the coding agents family: they read a repository, edit files, run the tests and fix things until everything passes, in a terminal or an editor. On our grid it ranks #46 of the 74 projects of this family listed in the directory.

You use it from: terminal (CLI). Usable models: GPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), DeepSeek, and OpenRouter. It can run on your own machine or server.

Who is Plandex for?

It is aimed at developers and technical teams who want to hand off part of the work on their codebase while keeping the final review. Typical tasks people give it:

• fix a bug from an issue or an error message
• write or extend tests
• migrate code to a new library version
• explain an unfamiliar codebase

It is a good candidate if you are comfortable in a terminal and your data must stay on your machines.

Access and human control

According to its documentation, Plandex can:

• run commands in a terminal
• read and edit files

By default it asks for your confirmation before sensitive actions (command, send, delete). Keep that setting, at least at first: full-auto mode saves time but removes the last safeguard.

Plandex pricing

The code is free, under the MIT licence.

Getting started with Plandex

1. Install it: the project ships as a single Go binary, downloadable from the repository releases. The exact command is in the repository README.
2. Create an API key with the model provider and put it in an environment variable, never in a shared or versioned file.
3. Give it a first playground with nothing at stake: a test folder, a secondary account or a throwaway project. Only open your real accounts once you have seen how it behaves.
4. Give it a short, checkable task, review the result and its action log, then raise the difficulty step by step.

Security: risk level

A coding agent runs commands on your machine: work on a Git branch, review the changes and isolate it in a container for long tasks.

Points found for Plandex:

• Supervised sensitive access: it can act on the system, but asks for confirmation by default.
• Maintenance: no commit for 13 months, flaws are no longer fixed.

Three habits: least privilege (minimal rights, dedicated keys), human approval for irreversible actions, a sandbox for code execution. The AI agent security check reviews your setup in a few minutes.

Project activity and releases

Created on October 24, 2023, the plandex-ai/plandex repository has 15,781 stars, 1,178 forks and 44 open issues, with 1,483 commits in total. Last change 13 months ago.

Over the last 52 weeks: 0 commits, an average of 0 per week.

73 releases in total; 0 in the last twelve months. Latest release: server/v2.2.1, on July 16, 2025.

Plandex vs other coding agents

GitHub stars of the best-rated open-source projects in the coding agents family. Stars measure attention, not quality: a heavily promoted project collects them fast, a specialised tool will have few.

Plandex and other coding agents at a glance

The 7 best-ranked agents in the same family, 7 of them open source. The score out of 100 only applies to open-source projects; for proprietary services we show the published entry price. A dash marks information the documentation does not state.

How we rated it

Score: 56/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 26/40: 15,781 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 0/30: last commit 13 months ago, 0 releases in six months, 0 commits in a year.
• Framework 30/30: licence, default human approval, self-hosting, model choice and documentation site.

The score does not say whether the agent will succeed at your tasks: it measures how solid the project is. The full grid is on the method page.