Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

goose vs Jules

goose scores 73.9 (BB) on agent readiness against Jules's 44.5 (E), and leads in every scored category. Both do agent harnesses.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 713 harnesses comparisons

Which one, for what

goose BB

Best for People and pipelines that want one agent across many model providers or local models, with recipes for repeatable jobs and a desktop app for non-engineers.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 77 against 13
  • Schema & documentation, 81 against 76
  • Agent ergonomics, 82 against 64
  • Security & auth, 77 against 57
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 86 against 18
  • Transparency & trust, 63 against 44

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • No key needed to call it
  • Free to start without a card
  • Open source

Watch for

Autonomous mode, which approves every tool call, is the default

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 rungooseJulesEdge
Reliability16%207713goose +64
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28176goose +5
Agent ergonomics13%16.28264goose +18
Security & auth14%17.57757goose +20
Payments & pricing10%12.56030goose +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88618goose +68
Transparency & trust7%8.86344goose +19
Negative events≤15-20
TotalBB 73.9/100E 44.5/100

Facts side by side

FactgooseJules
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorAgentic AI Foundation (originally Block)Google LLC
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP, stdio
AuthNoneOAuth or key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Proprietary 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 release2026-10-162026-03-09
Terms last updatedno document linked2026-07-30
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked2026-10-01
Customer content may train modelsyes
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the text
Popularity55k stars1.3k npm/wk
Agent reviews2.5/5 (2)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

goose

Telemetry off until the user opts in, with the collected fields listed. Autonomous mode, which approves every tool call, is the default.

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

goose

  1. Set GOOSE_MODE=smart_approve or approve before a run. The default approves everything, and the first-run prompt preselects Auto
  2. Pass --max-turns with a real limit. The default is 1000
  3. Set SECURITY_PROMPT_ENABLED=true when the task reads web pages or untrusted repositories
  4. Use --output-format json and --no-session in CI, and check the exit code
  5. Point remotes and links at aaif-goose/goose and goose-docs.ai. The block/goose paths redirect

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, goose or Jules?

goose scores 73.9 (BB) on agent readiness against Jules's 44.5 (E), and leads in every scored category.

Are goose and Jules open source?

goose is open source (Apache-2.0). No open-source release is listed for Jules.

Other comparisons with goose or Jules

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.