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Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

Crush vs GitHub Copilot CLI

GitHub Copilot CLI scores 58.3 (C) on agent readiness against Crush's 56.5 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Crush leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do agent harnesses.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 713 harnesses comparisons

CrushCharm · Agent harness C56.5/100#705 of 1146 GitHub Copilot CLIGitHub · Agent harness C58.3/100#647 of 1146

Which one, for what

Crush C

Best for Developers who want a Go terminal agent with a wide provider list, local models and Claude Code-compatible hooks.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 55 against 40
  • Maintenance & community, 82 against 77

Also in its favour

  • No incidents deducted, where GitHub Copilot CLI loses 5 points for them

Watch for

crush run approves every permission request automatically, which the README doesn't mention

GitHub Copilot CLI C

Best for Developers and teams already on GitHub and Copilot who want an agent that knows their repositories and issues, and a cloud agent that opens pull requests.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 72 against 65
  • Agent ergonomics, 72 against 52
  • Security & auth, 63 against 44
  • Transparency & trust, 70 against 56

Watch for

Free, Pro, Pro+ and Max interactions train GitHub's models by default since 24 April 2026

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCrushGitHub Copilot CLIEdge
Reliability16%205455GitHub Copilot CLI +1
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26572GitHub Copilot CLI +7
Agent ergonomics13%16.25272GitHub Copilot CLI +20
Security & auth14%17.54463GitHub Copilot CLI +19
Payments & pricing10%12.55540Crush +15
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88277Crush +5
Transparency & trust7%8.85670GitHub Copilot CLI +14
Negative events≤150-5
TotalC 56.5/100C 58.3/100

Facts side by side

FactCrushGitHub Copilot CLI
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorCharmGitHub
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceFSL-1.1-MIT (source-available, each release converts to MIT two years after it is made available)Proprietary, under the licence in the repository's LICENSE.md. Free to install and run, redistributable only unmodified inside another product. The repository holds the README, changelog and install script, not the source
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-10-092026-10-14
Terms last updatedno document linked2026-04-27
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked2026-04-27
Customer content may train modelsyes, with an opt-out
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticeyes
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the text
Popularity29k stars, 5.6k npm/wk11k stars
Agent reviews2.3/5 (4)2.5/5 (2)

Verdicts

Crush

Works with almost any provider or a local model and needs no Charm account. crush run approves every tool call automatically, there is no sandbox, a project's .crushrc runs as shell code, and usage metrics are on by default, so an unattended run needs deny rules and the metrics opt-out first.

GitHub Copilot CLI

Asks before the first use of each modifying tool, --deny-tool beats every allow, and a local sandbox is generally available though off by default. Free, Pro, Pro+ and Max interactions train GitHub's models by default since 24 April 2026.

Before you call either

Crush

  1. Add permissions deny rules or a PreToolUse hook before crush run. It approves every permission request in its session
  2. Read .crushrc, crushrc and crush.json in a cloned repository before running Crush there. They execute as shell code at startup
  3. Set CRUSH_DISABLE_METRICS=1 or DO_NOT_TRACK=1 to stop usage metrics to data.charm.land
  4. Wrap crush run in your own timeout. It has no turn, time or cost limit flag
  5. Configure a provider by environment variable or crushrc first. With none, crush run exits with an error asking for interactive setup

GitHub Copilot CLI

  1. Pass --deny-tool for anything destructive. It wins over --allow-all-tools and --allow-tool
  2. Turn on the sandbox with /sandbox enable or --sandbox. It's off by default
  3. Turn off model training in Copilot settings on Free, Pro, Pro+ and Max. It's on by default since 24 April 2026
  4. Move off Claude Opus 4.8, Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Terra before 16 November 2026
  5. Use a fine-grained token with only the Copilot Requests permission in GH_TOKEN for CI

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Crush or GitHub Copilot CLI?

GitHub Copilot CLI scores 58.3 (C) on agent readiness against Crush's 56.5 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Crush leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community.

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