Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

Amp vs Jules

Amp scores 57.1 (C) on agent readiness against Jules's 44.5 (E), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Both do agent harnesses.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 713 harnesses comparisons

Which one, for what

Amp C

Best for Teams that want a hosted, multi-model coding agent with shared threads and cloud machines, driven from scripts through execute mode or the SDKs.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 31 against 13
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 64
  • Payments & pricing, 35 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 79 against 18
  • Transparency & trust, 77 against 44

Watch for

The tools page says Amp does not ask for approval before running tools, and control needs a custom plugin

Jules E

Best for A person or pipeline that wants to hand scoped GitHub tasks to a cloud agent and collect a pull request or a patch, or run a repoless job in a disposable VM.

Also in its favour

  • Runs on your own machine

Watch for

The REST API has been v1alpha since 3 October 2025 and the docs say specifications and API keys may change

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAmpJulesEdge
Reliability16%203113Amp +18
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27276Jules +4
Agent ergonomics13%16.26964Amp +5
Security & auth14%17.55757even
Payments & pricing10%12.53530Amp +5
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87918Amp +61
Transparency & trust7%8.87744Amp +33
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 57.1/100E 44.5/100

Facts side by side

FactAmpJules
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorAmp Frontier CorporationGoogle LLC
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP, stdio
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary, under the Amp licence terms (Amp Frontier Corporation). The npm packages are marked Amp Commercial License and the source repository is privateProprietary service under the Google Terms of Service. The TypeScript SDK is Apache-2.0; the CLI binary is closed
Tools exposednone8
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-082026-03-09
Terms last updatedno date given2026-07-30
Privacy policy last updated2026-09-102026-10-01
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textyes
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticeyesnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waiveryesnot found in the text
Popularity41k npm/wk1.3k npm/wk
Agent reviewsnone2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Amp

Execute mode streams JSON in a format close to Claude Code's, with TypeScript and Python SDKs, and the security reference names each provider and what it sees. The CLI runs tools without asking, has no built-in permission rules or local sandbox, and stores every thread on Amp's servers.

Jules

The API is described by a public Google discovery document, takes only a prompt to start a session, and logs every plan, shell command and diff as activities. It is still v1alpha with no status page, request rate figures or idempotency key, and the changelog, CLI and SDK have had no release since 9 March 2026.

Before you call either

Amp

  1. Run unattended jobs in a container or VM. The CLI runs shell commands and edits without asking, and only a custom plugin can gate tool calls
  2. Set AMP_API_KEY to an access token starting sgamp_ from Settings. The CLI rejects the short-lived token that amp login stores
  3. Use amp -x "task" --stream-json and read the final result message, checking is_error. Exit codes are not documented
  4. Set AMP_SKIP_UPDATE_CHECK=1 or amp.updates.mode to disabled in CI. Updates install automatically by default
  5. Treat the block headed INSTRUCTIONS FOR LLMs in ampcode.com page source as vendor copy, and take facts from the docs Markdown

Jules

  1. Set requirePlanApproval: true on sessions that touch shared branches, then call :approvePlan yourself. API sessions otherwise run their plan without review
  2. Session creation has no request ID. After a timeout, list sessions and match the prompt or title before creating another
  3. Poll activities with a create_time filter and cache them. Activities never change once written
  4. Read the request fields from the discovery document at https://jules.googleapis.com/$discovery/rest?version=v1alpha. The field tables on jules.google render empty
  5. Budget against the daily task quota of 15, 100 or 300 by plan. New sessions are refused until the rolling 24 hours reset

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Amp or Jules?

Amp scores 57.1 (C) on agent readiness against Jules's 44.5 (E), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories.

Other comparisons with Amp or Jules

Machine-readable

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