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 | 2-week Pro trial | $20/mo (Pro), $60/mo (Pro+), $200/mo (Ultra) | 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); usage-based billing from Jun 2026 | Autocomplete (best), Chat, Agent Mode, Code Review, PR Integration, AI Credits system | 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 4 Sonnet/Opus, Sonnet 5 | Complex reasoning & refactoring |
| Windsurf 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | Limited quota | $20/mo (Pro), $40/seat (Teams) | Autocomplete, Chat, Cascade Agent, Terminal, Contextual Awareness, Quota-refresh system | VS Code (forked — Windsurf IDE) | Yes — Cascade | GPT-4o, Claude, SWE-1, Gemini 3.1 Pro | Context management & flow |
| Replit Agent 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | 1 agent run/hr | $20–$25/mo (Core), $95–$100/mo (Pro) | Agent Mode, Full-stack Generation, Deploy, Browser IDE | Replit (browser) | Yes — Can deploy apps | Custom, Claude, GPT-4o | Rapid prototyping & beginners |
| Lovable 🇸🇪 Sweden | 🇸🇪 Sweden | 5 credits/day | $20–$25/mo (Starter), $50/mo (Business) | Build Agent, Full-stack Web Apps, Supabase Integration | Web app (Lovable editor) | Yes — App generation | GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 | Full-stack apps w/ Supabase |
| Bolt.new 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | 1M tokens/mo | $20/mo (Hobby), $25/mo (Pro) | Agent Mode, Sandbox Preview, Deploy, Full-stack Generation, WebContainers | Web app (bolt.new) | Yes — Can deploy | GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Gemini | Quick MVPs & instant preview |
| v0 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | $5 credits/mo | $20/mo (Premium), $30/user (Team) | UI Generation, React/Tailwind, Vercel Deploy, Agent Mode, Figma import | Web app (v0.dev) | Yes — UI-focused | v0-1.5-lg, GPT-4o, Claude | React/Tailwind components |
| Codex CLI 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | OpenAI free credits | Pay-as-you-go (API) | Agent Mode, Terminal-Native, Sandboxed, File Editing | Terminal (CLI) | Yes — Very good | GPT-4o, o4-mini | CLI-first devs; OpenAI native |
| Cody 🇺🇸 USA | 🇺🇸 USA | Free/Pro tiers DISCONTINUED Jul 2025 | Enterprise only: from $59/seat/mo | Autocomplete, Chat, Commands, Code Graph, Multi-repo, Code Search | VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim | Yes — Commands | GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 | 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 | 50 completions | $19/user/mo (Pro) | Autocomplete, Chat, Security Scanning, AWS-native, Code Reviews | VS Code, JetBrains, AWS | Yes | Amazon Titan, Bedrock | AWS developers & security |
| Tabnine 🇮🇱 Israel | 🇮🇱 Israel | Limited community tier | $39/user/mo (Code Assistant), $59/user/mo (Agentic Platform) | Autocomplete (privacy), Chat, On-premise, 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 | Free self-hosted | Autocomplete, Chat, Multi-backend (OpenAI, Anthropic, Local) | VS Code, JetBrains | No | Multiple backends | Open-source; local models |