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
| Category | Weight this run | goose | Jules | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 77 | 13 | goose +64 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 81 | 76 | goose +5 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 82 | 64 | goose +18 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 77 | 57 | goose +20 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 60 | 30 | goose +30 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 86 | 18 | goose +68 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 63 | 44 | goose +19 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -2 | 0 | |
| Total | BB 73.9/100 | E 44.5/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | goose | Jules |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Vendor | Agentic AI Foundation (originally Block) | Google LLC |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio | |
| Auth | None | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Free | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Proprietary service under the Google Terms of Service. The TypeScript SDK is Apache-2.0; the CLI binary is closed |
| Tools exposed | none | 8 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-16 | 2026-03-09 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | 2026-07-30 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | 2026-10-01 |
| Customer content may train models | yes | |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | |
| Popularity | 55k stars | 1.3k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (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
- Set
GOOSE_MODE=smart_approveorapprovebefore a run. The default approves everything, and the first-run prompt preselects Auto - Pass
--max-turnswith a real limit. The default is 1000 - Set
SECURITY_PROMPT_ENABLED=truewhen the task reads web pages or untrusted repositories - Use
--output-format jsonand--no-sessionin CI, and check the exit code - Point remotes and links at aaif-goose/goose and goose-docs.ai. The block/goose paths redirect
Jules
- Set
requirePlanApproval: trueon sessions that touch shared branches, then call:approvePlanyourself. API sessions otherwise run their plan without review - Session creation has no request ID. After a timeout, list sessions and match the prompt or title before creating another
- Poll activities with a
create_timefilter and cache them. Activities never change once written - 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
- 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
- Agent Zero vs goose
- Agent Zero vs Jules
- Aider vs goose
- Aider vs Jules
- Amp vs goose
- Amp vs Jules
- Antigravity CLI vs goose
- Antigravity CLI vs Jules
- Auggie CLI vs goose
- Auggie CLI vs Jules
- Claude Code vs goose
- Claude Code vs Jules
- Cline vs goose
- Cline vs Jules
- Crush vs goose
- Crush vs Jules
- Cursor CLI vs goose
- Cursor CLI vs Jules
- DeepSeek Harness (dsh) vs goose
- DeepSeek Harness (dsh) vs Jules
- Devin vs goose
- Devin vs Jules
- Droid CLI vs goose
- Droid CLI vs Jules
- Pi vs goose
- Pi vs Jules
- Gemini CLI vs goose
- Gemini CLI vs Jules
- GitHub Copilot CLI vs goose
- GitHub Copilot CLI vs Jules
- goose vs Harness²
- goose vs HarnessRouter
- goose vs Junie CLI
- goose vs Kilo Code CLI
- goose vs Kimi Code CLI
- goose vs Kiro CLI
- goose vs mini-swe-agent
- goose vs Mistral Vibe CLI
- goose vs Muse Code
- goose vs OpenAI Codex
- goose vs OpenCode
- goose vs OpenHands
- goose vs Prime Agent
- goose vs Qoder CLI
- goose vs Qwen Code
- goose vs Mirror CLI
- goose vs Rovo Dev CLI
- goose vs Warp (Warp Agent CLI and the Oz Agent API)
- Harness² vs Jules
- HarnessRouter vs Jules
- Jules vs Junie CLI
- Jules vs Kilo Code CLI
- Jules vs Kimi Code CLI
- Jules vs Kiro CLI
- Jules vs mini-swe-agent
- Jules vs Mistral Vibe CLI
- Jules vs Muse Code
- Jules vs OpenAI Codex
- Jules vs OpenCode
- Jules vs OpenHands
- Jules vs Prime Agent
- Jules vs Qoder CLI
- Jules vs Qwen Code
- Jules vs Mirror CLI
- Jules vs Rovo Dev CLI
- Jules vs Warp (Warp Agent CLI and the Oz Agent API)
- CLI Manager vs goose
- CLI Manager vs Jules
- goose vs Harness
- goose vs Paperclip
- goose vs Parallax
- Harness vs Jules
- Jules vs Paperclip
- Jules vs Parallax
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/goose-vs-jules.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/goose.json·/api/v1/tools/jules.json - From a terminal
anchor compare goose jules(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "goose", "b": "jules"}at/mcp, no key