OpenRouter Coding Leaderboard — Monthly Analysis

June 2026 snapshot

Snapshot date: 2026-06-01 · Previous: 2026-05-04 · Live leaderboard ↗

The ranking

*Estimated from third-party reports; live page JS-rendered. Ranks 11–20 include Qwen Code, GDevelop, OpenHands, Agent Zero, Studs.gg, Portkey AI, Crush, zorai, and others. Lemonade and Agent Zero dropped from top 10. Total 30-day coding volume: ~1,640B tokens (est.), up ~28% MoM.

Note — daily leaderboard: Kilo Code reclaimed the daily #1 spot in late May by routing 313B tokens in 24 hours, 222B of them through GLM-5 (Z.ai). The monthly rolling figures above reflect the full 30-day window, where Hermes still leads.

What's interesting (our take)

• Hermes takes the monthly crown for the first time. With ~341B tokens and 20.8% share, Hermes Agent moved from #2 to #1 in the 30-day rolling window — up from 217B (16.96%) in May. This is the first month Hermes leads the monthly leaderboard rather than just the daily view. The growth is consistent and broad-based, not a single-day spike.
• OpenClaw's share collapsed 5.8 percentage points — the only top-3 app to lose absolute tokens. Despite the total market growing ~28%, OpenClaw fell from 240B (18.78%) to ~214B (13.0%). That shrinkage in an expanding market means OpenClaw lost users, not just share. It held #1 for just one month (May) before being displaced. Whether this is a model-launch anomaly or structural displacement is June's most important question.
• Kilo Code's GLM-5 arbitrage: model routing as a growth hack. In late May, Kilo Code routed 71% of a 313B-token day through GLM-5 — Zhipu AI's new frontier model at ~$1/M input tokens, roughly 3–10x cheaper than comparable models. This pushed Kilo Code to daily #1 and helped recover the monthly total from a mid-May trough of 149B to ~208B. It's the first time we've seen an app visibly use model-routing economics to inflate leaderboard position. GLM-5 may be auto-selected for background agentic tasks (retries, plan loops), making the spike partially a scaffolding artifact.
• Descript entered the top 5 at ~55B tokens — an AI video and podcast editor that has no traditional code-generation use case. Its appearance in the coding category confirms that OpenRouter's attribution is broader than IDE usage: any app that calls LLM APIs for content generation may be counted here. This is the first vertical-specialist story that isn't a dev-tool: a non-IDE app in the top 5.
• LangChain appeared in the top 10 — the orchestration framework's OpenRouter-attributed usage entering the ranked apps list signals that the infrastructure/SDK layer is now generating enough attributed tokens to compete with end-user apps. This is a category-composition shift worth watching.
• Market expansion decelerating: +28% MoM vs. +56% MoM last month. Still growing, but the hyper-growth phase of OpenClaw's entry appears to have inflated May's numbers. The underlying trend is healthy expansion at 25–30% monthly — well above typical SaaS benchmarks.

What we'll watch next month

• Can Kilo Code sustain GLM-5-driven volume for a full 30-day window, or does it fade when users discover most tokens are going to a cheap background model rather than their chosen frontier model? A sustained monthly #1 would make this a real growth story; a one-week spike would confirm it's routing arbitrage.
• OpenClaw's third month: two consecutive months of absolute-token decline in an expanding market would be the strongest structural signal yet that the coding category is diversifying away from the original platform. Watch whether OpenClaw drops further or stabilizes around 10–12% share.
• Descript and LangChain durability: vertical-specialist and infrastructure entries historically spike once and drop (see: Lemonade in April, Agent Zero in May). If both hold top-10 positions in July, it signals a genuine broadening of the coding category definition on OpenRouter.

May 2026 snapshot

Snapshot date: 2026-05-04 · Previous: 2026-04-28 · Live leaderboard ↗

The ranking

Ranks 11–20: Qwen Code (3.29B), GDevelop (3.13B), OpenHands (2.94B), Studs.gg (2.11B), Portkey AI (1.79B), Deep Agents CLI (1.75B), Crush (1.1B), zorai (0.781B), Ito (0.504B), OpenSquilla (0.388B)

What's interesting (our take)

• OpenClaw debuted at #1 with 240B tokens. The original platform that all major forks descend from reclaimed the top position in a single month — it either wasn't tracked by OpenRouter previously or had a dramatic activation event. At 18.78% share it sits above Kilo Code's previous peak (22.9% in April, but measured against a smaller total market).
• The fork chain is fragmenting. Kilo Code (a Cline-fork) fell from #1 to #3 and lost 28B tokens in absolute terms — the only app in the top 10 to shrink month-over-month. Roo Code and Cline also fell in rank. The forks are being cannibalized by their upstream as OpenClaw's own feature velocity accelerated.
• Total market volume grew ~56% month-over-month (estimated ~821B → ~1,278B total tokens), making this expansion, not zero-sum competition. Nearly every app gained absolute tokens; Kilo Code's absolute shrink is therefore notable — it lost users while the category boomed.
• pi surged from #7 to #5, more than doubling its tokens (13.9B → 37.8B). pi is primarily a conversational companion product, not a dev-focused agent. Its rise into coding territory likely reflects developers using it for pair-programming discussion and architecture review rather than direct code generation — a use pattern worth watching.
• Lemonade reversed sharply, falling from #4 to #7 despite absolute token growth. Last month's vertical-specialist story (Roblox-focused coding) appears to have been a timing coincidence rather than durable adoption. Vertical specialists may face stickier competition from general-purpose agents that can be prompted into any vertical.
• Long-tail expansion: 8 new entrants in positions 11–20 including Qwen Code, Zed Editor, Studs.gg, and Portkey AI. Top-3 concentration dropped from ~55% to ~48% of total volume. The category is broadening even as the top two positions consolidated.

What we'll watch next month

• Can Kilo Code arrest its absolute token decline, or will it continue ceding ground to OpenClaw? A second month of shrinkage would be a structural signal, not noise.
• Will pi's coding-category surge continue? If it crosses 5% share it will be the clearest signal yet that conversational agents are encroaching on dev-tool territory.
• Can Qwen Code or Zed Editor break into the top 5? Both entered the top 20 this month — Qwen Code especially benefits from its open-weight model base and lower per-token cost on OpenRouter.
• Does OpenClaw hold #1, or was this entry spike a model-launch artifact? The May snapshot will tell us if the 240B total is a new floor or a one-time activation event.

April 2026 snapshot (baseline)

Snapshot date: 2026-04-28 · Inaugural snapshot — no previous data for comparison · Live leaderboard ↗

The ranking

Context

• Kilo Code led at 22.9% share with 188B tokens — a commanding position driven by its aggressive fork-chain innovation on top of Cline and Claude Code's base. The top-3 (Kilo, Hermes, Claude Code) held ~55% of total coding volume.
• Lemonade cracked the top 5 as a vertical specialist — the Roblox-focused coding agent entered the top 4 despite a narrow use-case focus. An early signal that niche agents can compete on OpenRouter volume.
• Fork chain clearly dominant — Kilo Code (#1), Cline (#5), and Roo Code (#6) collectively held ~27% share, demonstrating the Cline→Roo→Kilo lineage's reach.
• Hermes Agent strong at #2 — 178B tokens across coding tasks, confirming Hermes's cross-functional usage beyond just scheduling and assistant work.

What we watched for May

• Whether Lemonade's vertical-specialist position would hold or be a one-month spike.
• Whether any new major entrant would challenge Kilo Code's top position.
• Whether total market volume was growing or purely zero-sum competition between existing apps.