agentic compare

agentic vs claude-code-router

claude-code-router (CCR) is the most popular way to point Claude Code at other models, and for good reason: it is a capable control plane with a big plugin ecosystem. agentic solves the same core problem for a different person. This page is the honest version of who should pick which.

Pick CCR if

  • You want one control plane for several agents and tools, not just Claude Code.
  • You are comfortable running and administering a long-lived router process.
  • You want its plugin and transformer ecosystem.

Pick agentic if

  • You want Claude Code exactly as Anthropic ships it, unmodified and auto-updating, with nothing to operate. agentic is a static Go binary; the first session binds the port, the last one out turns off the lights.
  • You want spend control that cannot be talked past: every token priced as it happens, and daily, weekly, or monthly budgets that refuse the next request instead of warning after the fact.
  • You want a classifier to pick the cheapest model that fits each turn, size-checked against each model's real context window before the request goes out.
  • You want agentic cost to answer "where did today's $4.31 go" without a dashboard.

Side by side

Same four rows as the homepage table — harness, how it runs, cost and budgets, model routing — with the other columns dropped so CCR and agentic can be read against each other.

agentic claude-code-router
Harness Real Claude Code, unmodified, auto-updating Real Claude Code, unmodified
Runs as Static Go binary, no daemon (leader election over a fixed port) Daemon / server process you deploy and administer
Cost & budgets First-class CLI: agentic cost, live statusline, hard-stop daily / weekly / monthly budgets Usually a dashboard or not built in
Model routing Aliases + a built-in LLM-classifier tier router (auto), size-aware and sticky per turn, with optional per-task specialist overrides Rule-based routing configs; no classifier-based tiering

The honest catch

CCR is older, bigger, and battle-tested by far more users. agentic is newer and built for one developer's machine, not a team. If you run a team gateway, LiteLLM or CCR is the right layer today. If you are one developer who wants claude, unmodified, with a budget and a cheap-model escape hatch, agentic installs in one command and has nothing to administer.

One command to a tracked session.

$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maorbril/agentic/main/install.sh | sh
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