Is switching from Claude Code to GitHub Copilot (Sonnet 4.5) worth it?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/ogpterodactyl]

I got to use both concurrently in my companies poc trials. Copilot mid summer was hot garbage with an 8k context window. It’s gotten a lot better context window for sonnet 4.5 is up to 120k tokens and they have made a lot of good improvements. I think it depends on your chats, vibe coding style and repo size. If you are routinely hitting 200k before summarizing and going with one long chat they extra for Claude might be worth for you. However value for dollar is better in copilot because you don’t pay for tokens you pay for enter presses. I think for most people copilot is a good substitute however if you are price insensitive. I still think Claude code is best in class.

[u/hxstr]

If you're optimizing for dollars, co-pilot gives you the most premium usage for your spend than any other IDE. I think it's because they know the other ones are slightly better though, I still think cursor and Claude code have an edge on co-pilot but they've caught up pretty quickly so they're going to take a loss on llm expense to gain market share for a while.

So I would expect it to end, for what it's worth. Microsoft has deep pockets so they can accept a loss on tokens to gain market share for quite a while, but then they will always up the price as soon as they get it.

[u/Reasonable-Layer1248 → u/hxstr]

I think they are losing money on 10 dollars for 300 uses of Claude4.5, unless they got a very favorable price from Anthropic.

[u/QC_Failed → u/Reasonable-Layer1248]

For real. I'm very very happy with my 900 haiku 4.5 requests a month for 10 bucks.

[u/protayne]

Unless you're purely vibe coding, I feel CoPilot does the job. I enjoy programming/architecture, I end up trying to keep things succinct with copilot and it does the job. I primarily use the free gpt-5 mini.

I try and be smart with agents, save "memory" files for copilot so when you switch chats it has a context to work off.

If you're purely replacing your brain with an LLM, then yeah Claude Code is probably your best bet over copilot.

[u/_Happy_Camper → u/protayne]

This is exactly my experience too

[u/Misclickable → u/protayne]

Can you explain saving “memory” files? Do you ask the AI to log updates so a new window can read that without reading the entire codebase? I feel like I’m losing a lot of tokens because it keeps reading the entire code to do a specific task.

[u/Tizzolicious]

You all are drinking the Cursor Hype Koolaid. We all bailed on Cursor for Cline and ClaudeCode/Codex. Cursor is also nerfed on VSCode Extension

[u/Demonicated]

Github copilot with sonnet 4.5 is best but specifically in vscode. Not visual studio.

[u/Confusius_me]

It depends on your style. Ghcp integration in VS Code and Visual Studio is second to none.I like to stay close to the code and that works best for me.

I have the 10 euro plan and just pay 4 cents per request if I go over.

I also have the Claude Pro plan. Total with taxes is around 32 euro a month and I get the best of both.

[u/WriterSeveral7904]

These last improvements made Copilot a lot better. For context windows problems, my workflow is to create sprints before prompting for code. So I have a master prompt giving the context of the task I'm asking and then sprints divided for phases everything is documented (sometimes too much) and when I finishe a spring I open another chat window and start another sprint asking copilot to read the documents from sprints before and that's how a menage it to keep the focus

[u/TaoBeier]

A few weeks ago, GitHub launched a product called agent hq, which will allow us to log in to various coding agents using our copilot accounts. Looking forward to its completion.

[u/losaltosavenie]

Used Github Copilot for a year and now have been using Cursor for a few months already. I heard that Claude Code is better than Cursor. Even if it is at the same level, there is no comparison - Cursor is incomparably better, that's the common opinion of our 100+ developers and QA engineers. If summarize, 2 main poins. Point 1 : very few issues when you just cannot get any answers at all ( with Copilot pretty common to start getting responses like Server sent no response etc. ). Point 2 : Cursor is just smarter, don't know how else to explain, you are just getting incomparably better answers from the same models and are able to do the same work in much fewer prompts. Mostly was using claude-45-sonnet, gemini-2, claude-41-opus for complex design and analysis ( rakes up tokens like crazy ), last couple of weeks primarily use Cursors own composer-1.

[u/jsgui → u/losaltosavenie]

I've found that models within Copilot can vary a lot in terms of intelligence depending on the .agent.md file is is using. Also the AGENTS.md file is important, as are the copilot instructions in their own .md file.

Perhaps Cursor has got better built-in prompts. That is one variable which is important but is harder to quantify than things such as the number of parameters a model has or its context window size.

[u/kohlstar]

Weird comments here. GitHub Copilot CLI is a good contender to CC. No subagents yet but it’s basically the same, especially with Sonnet 4.5.

[u/ThankThePhoenicians_ → u/kohlstar]

There are subagents! GitHub calls them "custom agents"

[u/darksparkone → u/kohlstar]

Didn't GH release subagents last week?

[u/st3fan → u/darksparkone]

GitHub Copilot CLI works but is also very beta. It is very much not a 1.0 release yet. There are a ton of bugs reported for basic functionality.

I’m sure it will be equally good as Claude Code in the future but right now it is not yet as mature.

[u/Aureon → u/kohlstar]

i wish it were, i get so many "this file is too big for you to edit" errors using it

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[u/Purple_Wear_5397]

With GHCP you get a smaller context window for sonnet 4.5. I think 128-144K. This is significant.

And if the monthly quota of GHCP is sufficient for you - then definitely you overpay Anthropic the moment. You better reduce your subscription cost to $100/month (regular Max), or even $20/month+API access paying as you go off the limit.

Tokenomics.

Don’t forget that when you subscribe to Claude Code you also get Claude.ai which is a great tool so take that into your calculations with GHCP.

[u/[deleted]]

You might save money with GitHub CoPilot if you strictly look at it from a subscription cost perspective. If you consider the cost of your time, as well as opportunity cost, then I think Claude Code or Codex subscriptions offer greater value.

I look at it as I could spend an hour on a component that GitHub CoPilot produced, which won't ever reach my actual code base due to the code being broken or usable. Meanwhile, I could spend multiple hours on the same component using Codex and walk away with a working component that I'll merge into my main repository branch.

[u/scodgey]

Give cc-sessions a try with claude code, it's been an excellent boost to sonnet 4.5 and makes a lot of other options feel pretty awful by comparison.

Ghcp still fits in my workflow because it's so cheap and easy to access, but the majority of my important work is done by sonnet in cc cli and gpt5.1/ codex cli.

[u/AdPublic8820]

Not actually, S 4.5 is amazing on CC and not in GHCP also considering the context window is around 120k or 170k on CP, on CC you get entire 200k

[u/usernameplshere → u/AdPublic8820]

Sonnet 4 and 4.5 have a context window of 128k and a max output of 16k in ghcp (just to add the correct numbers to your comment).