GitHub Copilot
The most widely used AI pair programmer, inside your editor
Copilot lives in VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim and GitHub itself, offering completions, chat and an agent mode that opens pull requests. The free tier…
Cursor
The AI-first code editor most startups switched to
Cursor is a VS Code fork rebuilt around AI: predictive Tab edits, codebase-aware chat and background agents that take a task and return a diff. It is the editor that made AI coding feel native, and it supports every major model provider.
Best for: professional developers who want an AI-native IDE
What works
- Best-in-class Tab completions
- Agents run in the background
- Familiar VS Code base and extensions
What to know
- Credit-based usage is hard to predict
- Pricing changes have frustrated users
Alternatives
Windsurf
AI IDE with the Cascade agent, now part of Cognition
Windsurf (renamed Devin Desktop in mid-2026 after Cognition acquired it) is a VS Code-based editor whose Cascade agent keeps deep context on your…
Claude Code
Anthropic's terminal agent that works across your whole repo
Claude Code runs in your terminal or IDE and takes on multi-file tasks: read the codebase, plan, edit, run tests, open a PR. It is included with…
