What's the Best Model to use with OpenCode

My strategies to find the best model in a quickly changing landscape.

I have been extensively using OpenCode over the past few months.

Overall, it has been working very well for me – but one issue I struggled with is to determine what model to use.

There are hundreds to choose from, and, interestingly, what seems to be straightforward choices often do not work.

I especially struggled with getting Gemini to work. It produces very subpar code and would often get stuck.

Models are evolving quickly, so it's not very useful for me to give you a specific model to use. Instead, I thought it's best I share the strategies I use to determine which model to use.

I'll give them in the order I find most effective to least effective:

(1) OpenRouter Statistics

A good indication if a model 'works well' for OpenCode is what other user's are using!

OpenRouter keeps statistics on what models are used for various app, so that feels like an obvious starting point.

Update April 26: Unfortunately, the OpenCode statistics have been removed from OpenRouter. The next best thing to use are the statistics for KiloCode (their CLI is essentially identical to OpenCode).

https://openrouter.ai/apps/kilo-code

This was the snapshot as of today:

It seems like users are having success with the MiniMa models .

Here it is good to keep in mind that Kilo Code makes certain models available for free – I assume that's the case for MiniMax M2.5.

These days I use MiniMax M2.7 for most of my coding.

(2) OpenCode Go Models

OpenCode has an offering called OpenCode Go, that's a fixed price per-month subscription that includes usage of a certain set of models.

Chances are, models included here will work well with OpenCode.

As of updating this in April '26, the following models are included:

  • GLM-5
  • GLM-5.1
  • Kimi K2.5
  • Kimi K2.6
  • MiMo-V2-Pro
  • MiMo-V2-Omni
  • MiMo-V2.5-Pro
  • MiMo-V2.5
  • MiniMax M2.5
  • MiniMax M2.7
  • Qwen3.5 Plus
  • Qwen3.6 Plus
  • DeepSeek V4 Pro
  • DeepSeek V4 Flash

(3) OpenCode Documentation

OpenCode includes a number of model recommendation in their documentation:

Models recommended by OpenCode

I'm putting this one last, since it included Gemini 3 Pro – which I never got to work correctly.

(4) Experiment!

In any case, OpenCode makes it easy to switch between models. So when using an aggregator service like OpenRouter or OpenCode Zen, it makes sense to quickly try out different models.

Just be mindful that some providers will use your data for training – so always best to check the model first before giving it a try.