A few differences:
- Plandex is more agentic—it can complete a complex task, updating many files, all in one go.
- Changes are applied to a sandbox by default rather than directly to project files, helping you prevent unintended changes.
- Plandex can automatically find the context it needs in the project.
- Plandex can execute commands (like installing dependencies, running tests, etc.) and auto-debug if they fail.
- Plandex should be more reliable on file edits—it uses an enhanced version of aider's diff-style edit that is resilient to multiple occurrences, but it also has validation, a whole file fallback, and on the cloud service, a custom fast apply model is also added to the mix. Will be publishing benchmarks on this soon.