Which AI coding tool should you actually pay for? Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code and more — straight comparison
| Name↕ | Origin↕ | Freetier↕ | Pricing↕ | Features↕ | Ide↕ | Agent↕ | Model↕ | Bestfor↕ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cursor 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | Hobby (free) | $20/mo (Pro), $60/mo (Pro+), $200/mo (Ultra), $40/seat (Teams) | Autocomplete, Chat, Agent Mode, Terminal, Multi-file Refactoring, Code Review, Credit-based billing | VS Code (forked) | Yes — Advanced | GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini | Power devs who want AI-native IDE |
| GitHub Copilot 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | Free for students/OSS | $10/mo (Pro), $39/mo (Pro+), $100/mo (Max); Business $19/Enterprise $39 per user; usage-based AI Credits from Jun 2026 | Autocomplete (best), Chat, Agent Mode, Code Review, PR Integration, AI Credits system — completions stay free on all paid plans | VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, Xcode | Yes — Good | GPT-4o, Codex, Claude | Most accessible; GitHub ecosystem |
| Claude Code 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | Not on Free plan | $20/mo (Pro), $100/mo (Max 5x), $200/mo (Max 20x); Team $25/seat | Agent Mode (best), Terminal-Native, Multi-file, Testing, Debugging, CLI tool | Terminal (CLI) + VS Code ext. | Yes — Best-in-class | Claude Opus 5 / Sonnet 5 | Complex reasoning & refactoring |
| Windsurf 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | Limited daily quota | $20/mo (Pro), $200/mo (Max), $40/seat (Teams) | Autocomplete (unlimited on all plans), Chat, Cascade Agent, Terminal, Daily/weekly quota system (since Mar 19, 2026), SWE-1.5 proprietary model, Cloud sessions | VS Code (forked — Windsurf IDE) | Yes — Cascade | SWE-1.5, GPT, Claude, Gemini | Context management & flow |
| Replit Agent 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | Starter (free) | $20/mo (Core, incl. $20 credits), $100/mo (Pro, up to 15 builders) | Agent Mode, Full-stack Generation, Deploy, Browser IDE, Agent 3 | Replit (browser) | Yes — Can deploy apps | Custom, Claude, GPT | Rapid prototyping & beginners |
| Lovable 🇸🇪 Sweden | 🇸🇪 Sweden | 5 credits/day (30/mo cap) | $25/mo (Pro, 100 credits), $50/mo (Business) | Build Agent, Full-stack Web Apps, Supabase Integration, Unified credit pool (build + hosting + AI), $25/mo free Cloud hosting on paid plans | Web app (Lovable editor) | Yes — App generation | GPT, Claude | Full-stack apps w/ Supabase |
| Bolt.new 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | 1M tokens/mo | $25/mo (Pro, 10M tokens), $30/user (Teams) | Agent Mode, Sandbox Preview, Deploy, Full-stack Generation, WebContainers, Bolt Cloud (DB/auth/hosting) | Web app (bolt.new) | Yes — Can deploy | Claude (default), GPT, Gemini | Quick MVPs & instant preview |
| v0 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | $5 credits/mo | $20/mo (Premium), $30/user (Team), $100/user (Business) | UI Generation, React/Tailwind, Vercel Deploy, Agent Mode, Figma import, token-based billing | Web app (v0.dev) | Yes — UI-focused | v0-1.5-lg, GPT, Claude | React/Tailwind components |
| Codex CLI 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | ChatGPT Free (limited) | Included w/ ChatGPT Plus $20/mo; Pro 5x $100/mo & Pro 20x $200/mo (Pro split Apr 9, 2026); API pay-as-you-go | Agent Mode, Terminal-Native, Sandboxed, File Editing, Cloud tasks, Code Reviews, Codex web app & IDE extension | Terminal (CLI) + IDE ext. | Yes — Very good | GPT-5.x-Codex | CLI-first devs; OpenAI native |
| Cody 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | Free/Pro tiers DISCONTINUED Jul 2025 | Enterprise only (from ~$99/seat/mo list; $50K+ contract) | Autocomplete, Chat, Commands, Code Graph, Multi-repo, Code Search | VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim | Yes — Commands | Claude, Gemini, GPT | Large enterprise codebases & multi-repo |
| Continue.dev 🌍 Open Source | 🌍 Open Source | Open source/free | Free self-hosted | Autocomplete, Chat, Any Model, Extensible, Privacy-first | VS Code, JetBrains | Experimental | Any (local or cloud) | Privacy & model flexibility |
| Amazon Q Developer 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | Perpetual free: 50 agentic requests/mo | $19/user/mo (Pro) | Autocomplete, Chat, Security Scanning, AWS-native, Code Reviews, Java code transformation | VS Code, JetBrains, AWS | Yes | Amazon Titan, Bedrock | AWS developers & security |
| Tabnine 🇮🇱 Israel | 🇮🇱 Israel | None (free plan retired; 90-day trial) | $39/user/mo (Code Assistant), $59/user/mo (Agentic), Enterprise custom | Autocomplete (privacy), Chat, On-premise/self-hosted, Train on your code, Zero code retention | VS Code, JetBrains, Vim, Eclipse | Yes (Agentic Platform) | Own fine-tuned models | Enterprise privacy & security needs |
| OpenClaw 🌍 Open Source | 🌍 Open Source | Open source/free (MIT) | Free self-hosted (pay model API costs) | Autonomous Agent, Task Automation, Browser Control, File Management, Messaging Apps (WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal), Local Gateway, Persistent memory, 381k+ GitHub stars | Local agent (CLI/gateway) | Yes — Autonomous agent | Any (local or cloud: OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) | Personal AI automation & local privacy |
| Qwen3.8-Flash 🇨🇳 China | 🇨🇳 China | Qwen Chat + open weights (Flash-Next on HF) | API ¥1/M in · ¥3/M out at launch (Aug 26, 2026), cut to ¥0.8/¥2.7 within 24h; Flash-Next $0.16/$0.47 | Multimodal, 262K→1M ctx, strong agentic coding at ~3% of Opus-class cost, built into Qwen Office standard mode; open-source Qwen3.8-Flash-Next = Qwen4 architecture preview (125B MoE, 6B active) | API / Qwen Chat / Qwen Office | Yes — Agentic-coding focused | Qwen3.8-Flash | Ultra-cheap agentic coding & long context |
| GLM-5.3-Flash 🇨🇳 China | 🇨🇳 China | MIT open weights on Hugging Face | $0.075/M in · $0.25/M out (50%-off promo until Sep 9, 2026; list $0.15/$0.50) | Natively multimodal (image+video input), 320B-A18B MoE, 1M-token ctx, MIT license, hybrid sparse+linear attention; ~10x cheaper than GLM-5.2 with better agentic scores; previously previewed as 'Ox Alpha' | API / Z.ai chat / open weights | Yes — Long-horizon agent tasks | GLM-5.3-Flash | Open-weight multimodal coding on a budget |