Gemini CLI
GoogleGoogle's terminal coding agent, bringing Gemini models into the shell for coding, debugging and task automation. It ships built-in tools for Google Search grounding, file operations, shell commands and web fetch, and extends through MCP and GEMINI.md system-prompt files.
A free tier runs on a personal Google account, with paid access through AI Studio or Vertex. Verified 2026-08-13 via the google-gemini/gemini-cli repository and Google's launch announcement.
Openness
5 high confidence- license
- Apache-2.0(OSI)
- source
- public
- core-gated
- ungated
Fully Apache-2.0; commercial relationship is on model quotas, not the tool.
- https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli recorded 2026-08-13
Apache-2.0 license badge plus three README statements - "Open source - Apache 2.0 licensed", "Gemini CLI is fully open source (Apache 2.0)", and "License - Apache License 2.0"; full source published, 106.5k stars; no enterprise directory or paid tier of the tool
Adoption
4 high confidence1,850,744 npm downloads in the trailing 30 days for @google/gemini-cli, which bands at level 4 (1M-10M) on the software and model adoption scale. Google's first-party terminal agent.
- https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/point/last-month/@google/gemini-cli recorded 2026-08-12
1,850,744 downloads in the trailing 30 days for @google/gemini-cli
Capability
5 high confidenceTop-tier coding agent; Search grounding is a standout vs peers. No benchmark placement is published for the CLI itself, so this stays a feature-matrix judgment, at the openhands anchor on breadth.
- https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/introducing-gemini-cli-open-source-ai-agent/ recorded 2026-08-13
official launch covering the free tier, MCP extensibility and GEMINI.md
- https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli recorded 2026-08-13
terminal-first agentic loop, MCP client and server, Google Search grounding, installation and auth paths; no benchmark figure published
Verified 2026-08-12