For the past few days, there has been a lot of hype around OpenAI's Codex. And at the same time, Claude Code has been evolving day by day, to a perfect AI Agent with a list of features like subagents, slash commands, MCP support, and so much more. While I still prefer Claude Code, I thought it would be interesting to see how both of them perform on the same task. People say Codex + GPT-5 provides code closer to what a human would write, so let's test them out.
Before we begin, Codex has introduced their support for stdio based MCPs. But still lacks the direct support for HTTP endpoints for MCPs. So to make sure our MCPs work, I've written a simple proxy layer over the stdio support so that Codex can use MCPs like Figma, Jira, GitHub, and more. You can find the code here: rube-mcp-adapter-auth.js
So I ran a real build using Figma MCP for UI cloning and a separate coding challenge. And as always both agents got identical prompts, same setup.
All the code from this comparison can be found here: github.com/rohittcodes/claude-vs-codex.
TL;DR
Don't have time? Here's what happened:
Figma cloning: Claude Code captured the design better but missed the yellow theme and a few details; Codex created its own version but was faster and cheaper
Job scheduler: Claude Code provided more reasoning steps and structured code; Codex was concise and faster
Overall: Claude Code is better for complex, detailed tasks with multiple steps. Codex is more efficient for straightforward code generation, with its own way of writing code.
UX/DX: Codex felt simpler to set up and use (not the HTTP-based MCPs); Claude’s developer experience felt deeper once you get used to it.
Cost: Claude Code used more tokens overall (Figma: 6,232,242; Scheduler: 234,772) vs Codex (Scheduler: 72,579; Figma: 1,499,455)