Top Copilot Alternatives You Need to Know About

Aug 20 2024

Are you a developer searching for alternatives to GitHub Copilot? AI coding assistants can help you code faster and more efficiently. This article highlights the top alternatives to GitHub Copilot, each with unique features to meet various needs and preferences.

Key Takeaways

Tabnine offers personalized AI models that focus on privacy and accessibility.
Amazon CodeWhisperer integrates deeply with AWS for smooth cloud development.
Codeium is known for its easy-to-use interface and strong community support.
Replit Ghostwriter excels in collaborative coding, making it great for team projects.
OpenAI Codex supports many popular AI coding assistants and various programming languages.

1. Tabnine

Tabnine is an AI-powered coding assistant designed to make your coding experience smoother and more efficient. It offers real-time code completions and supports a wide range of programming languages and IDEs. Tabnine adapts to your coding style, providing personalized and context-aware suggestions that fit seamlessly into your workflow.

Key Features

AI Code Completions: Provides relevant code snippets based on the context, significantly speeding up coding.
Code Generation from Comments: Converts comments into executable code, making it easier to implement functionality.
Language and IDE Support: Compatible with multiple programming languages like JavaScript, Python, and Java, and works with popular IDEs such as Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ.
Personalized AI: Learns from your codebase without seeing any actual code, ensuring privacy and security.
Chat: Allows developers to ask questions, get code generation and explanations, and search the organizational codebase.
Privacy and Security: Uses open-source code with permissive licenses for training models, eliminating privacy and security risks.

Pricing

Tabnine offers three pricing plans:

Basic Plan: Free with limited features.
Pro Plan: $12 per user per month, free for 90 days.
Enterprise Plan: $39 per user per month, includes additional features and private deployment options.

Tabnine is a versatile tool that not only enhances code consistency but also speeds up code reviews and improves overall productivity. Whether you're an individual developer or part of a large team, Tabnine is designed to elevate your software development experience.

2. Amazon CodeWhisperer

Amazon's CodeWhisperer is a powerful AI-driven coding assistant launched by AWS in 2022. It leverages large language models (LLMs) trained on a billion lines of code from various sources, including open-source repositories and internal Amazon repositories. This tool provides highly accurate and personalized recommendations to optimize code for performance, security, and maintainability.

CodeWhisperer supports 15 programming languages, such as Python, Java, JavaScript, and C#. It integrates seamlessly with popular IDEs like Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, and AWS Cloud9. This makes it a versatile tool for developers working in different environments.

Key features of CodeWhisperer include:

Real-time code suggestions: Offers instant code recommendations as you type.
Contextual code suggestion: Understands natural language comments and provides relevant code suggestions based on context.
Amazon Q: A conversational assistant in the IDE that helps explain and transform code or get personalized suggestions.
Security scanning: Built-in code scanning feature to identify and resolve security vulnerabilities early on.
Reference tracker: Keeps track of links to open-source code for review before inclusion.
Optimization for AWS services: Provides code suggestions optimized for AWS services like Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and Amazon S3.
Customizations: Tailor CodeWhisperer to specific needs, such as custom libraries and APIs.

The best part of Amazon CodeWhisperer is its ability to give real-time suggestions while coding. By using it regularly, you can enhance your coding experience and streamline your workflow.

Pricing for CodeWhisperer is straightforward:

Individual plan: Free to use with a simple sign-up for an AWS Builder ID.
Professional plan: Costs $19 per user per month and includes additional administrative features for organizations.

3. Codeium

Codeium is an AI-powered toolkit that helps developers write code faster and more effectively. It supports over 70 programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, and Go. This AI coding autocomplete and chat feature has significantly boosted our productivity.

One of the standout features of Codeium is its context-aware autocomplete. It analyzes your project files and repositories to provide accurate and relevant code suggestions in real-time. This means you get helpful feedback that fits whatever you’re working on.

Codeium also offers a Playground feature, allowing you to use it directly from your browser. Alternatively, you can use its extension to access core functionalities in your favorite IDEs.

Features

Greater language support: Unlike GitHub Copilot, Codeium supports over 70 programming languages, including less popular ones like COBOL, TeX, and Haskell.
Extensive IDE support: It’s compatible with 40+ IDEs, so you can access its robust features from your preferred development environment.
Context awareness: Codeium analyzes your project file and repository, allowing it to generate more accurate and appropriate suggestions.

Pricing

Plan	Price	Features
Individual	Free	Limited features
Teams	$12 per seat/month	All individual features, suitable for small or medium-sized teams (up to 200 users)
Enterprise	Custom pricing	All features of previous plans, plus additional enterprise-level benefits

Codeium is a versatile tool that caters to developers of all levels, from students to professionals. Its extensive language and IDE support make it a valuable asset in any coding toolkit.

4. Replit Ghostwriter

Replit Ghostwriter is an innovative AI-powered coding assistant integrated into Replit's online IDE. It aims to boost productivity and creativity by automating repetitive coding tasks. Ghostwriter's key feature is its AI-powered code completion, which provides in-line suggestions based on the existing code, speeding up the coding process.

Ghostwriter can generate code from natural language prompts, making it easy to experiment with new APIs, build web servers, or create complete GUIs. It also helps with code refactoring, allowing developers to modernize or convert code between languages efficiently. Additionally, Ghostwriter offers proactive debugging and code context awareness, ensuring a seamless coding experience.

By integrating these tools into your workflow, you can significantly enhance your team's productivity and ensure that projects are completed on time.

Ghostwriter supports over 50 programming languages, making it ideal for educational purposes and collaborative coding projects. It is beginner-friendly and provides a valuable supplement to existing knowledge, reducing the time spent on code exploration and assistance-seeking. With an average response time of 500ms, Ghostwriter is optimized for speed, ensuring a smooth coding experience.

5. OpenAI Codex

OpenAI Codex is a game-changer for developers, offering a transformative era in coding. This tool can turn plain English into code, making it easier for non-programmers to create software. Codex supports multiple programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, and Go, making it versatile for various projects.

Text-to-Code: Write commands in plain English and get functional code snippets.
Multi-Language Support: Works with Python, JavaScript, Go, and more.
Integration: Seamlessly integrates with popular IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains.
Simplifies coding for beginners and non-programmers.
Supports a wide range of programming languages.
Integrates well with popular development environments.
May generate less optimal code for complex tasks.
Requires internet access for full functionality.

6. FauxPilot

FauxPilot is an exciting open-source project that aims to be a local alternative to GitHub Copilot. It uses Salesforce CodeGen models and NVIDIA’s Triton Inference Server with the FasterTransformer backend to provide code suggestions. This makes it a strong contender in the AI coding assistant space.

One of the standout features of FauxPilot is its ability to run entirely on your local machine. This ensures privacy and eliminates the need for an internet connection. It's perfect for developers working in secure environments or those concerned about data privacy.

Setting up FauxPilot requires some technical know-how. You'll need Docker and an NVIDIA GPU with enough VRAM to run the model of your choice. The project provides a setup script that guides you through downloading and converting the necessary models.

While FauxPilot may not have the polish of GitHub Copilot, it’s a promising open-source alternative that continues to improve with community contributions.

FauxPilot's ability to run offline and integrate with VS Code makes it a strong contender in the AI coding assistant space.

7. Tabby

Tabby is an open-source, self-hosted AI coding assistant that offers contextual code suggestions. It analyzes your code and comments to provide relevant multi-line code snippets or entire functions. This makes coding smoother and more efficient, especially for complex projects.

Features

Open-source: Tabby is open-source, meaning you can look at its source code and perform various modifications to suit your needs.
Highly customizable: Tabby provides a CONFIG file where you can add different settings to control how the AI assistant functions.
Repository context: Tabby preprocesses your programming language, producing code completions and suggestions quickly. However, it supports fewer programming languages—popular languages like CSS, Julia, Perl, and Scala are not supported.

Pros

Try without the need to sign up
Easy configuration capabilities

Cons

May not always correctly format certain types of codes
Limited advanced coding features

Pricing

Free

Tabby is one of the most feature-rich open-source GitHub Copilot alternatives actively being developed by the community. It can be used through many IDEs as an extension, making it a versatile tool for developers.

8. CodeGeeX

CodeGeeX is an AI-based coding assistant that stands out for its multilingual code generation capabilities. It is powered by a large-scale model with 13 billion parameters, making it highly efficient and versatile.

Key Features

Code Suggestions: CodeGeeX provides intelligent coding suggestions as you type, making your development process smoother and faster.
Code Generation and Completion: It can autocomplete lines of code and generate multiple lines ahead based on the existing code or natural language comments.
Code Translation: This feature allows you to transform code from one language to another with high accuracy, simplifying the process of porting code.
Comment Generation: Automatically adds line-level comments to your code, saving you time and helping you understand unfamiliar code.
AI Chatbot: Instead of searching the web, you can ask CodeGeeX coding-related questions and get instant answers.
Compatibility: CodeGeeX integrates seamlessly with popular IDEs like VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA, and PyCharm, fitting into your workflow effortlessly.

CodeGeeX is a free alternative to GitHub Copilot for individual developers. For Pro and Enterprise plans, visit their official website for more details.

Pricing

Individual Plan: Free
Pro and Enterprise Plans: Visit the official website for more details.

CodeGeeX leverages large language models to provide various features like real-time assistance, code suggestions, and more, helping developers write programs more efficiently and faster.

9. Captain Stack

Captain Stack is a fantastic open-source alternative to GitHub Copilot, specifically designed for Visual Studio Code (VSCode). Unlike Copilot, which relies heavily on AI for code generation, Captain Stack takes a unique approach by using search queries to fetch code snippets from Google, GitHub Gist, and StackOverflow. This method allows developers to find relevant code suggestions directly within their editor.

Key Features

Code Search: Fetches code snippets from GitHub Gist and StackOverflow.
AI Code Generation: Utilizes OpenAI and OpenRouter for generating code.
User-Friendly: Easy to install and use within the familiar VSCode environment.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Straightforward installation process
User-friendly interface
Free to use

Cons

Limited advanced coding features
Relies on external sources for code suggestions

Captain Stack is continuously evolving, thanks to a dedicated community of contributors. This ensures its adaptability and functionality, making it a valuable tool for developers seeking code suggestions within VSCode.

10. GPT-Code-Clippy

GPT-Code-Clippy (GPT-CC) is an open-source coding assistant designed to be a free alternative to GitHub Copilot. It leverages the power of the GPT-3-based language model, GPT-Codex, and focuses on fine-tuning the GPT-Neo model on the GPT Code Clippy dataset. This dataset is meticulously curated from publicly available code repositories on GitHub.

GPT-CC offers several features that make it a valuable tool for developers:

Autocompletion
AI-powered code suggestions
Code generation within the Visual Studio Code (VSCode) environment

The training process for GPT-CC involves using Huggingface's Transformers library and Flax API. The model is fine-tuned on diverse code datasets, including the self-curated GPT Code Clippy dataset. This ensures that the tool remains up-to-date with the latest programming languages and techniques.

GPT-Code-Clippy is not just an open-source alternative to GitHub Copilot; it aims to match its performance and user-friendly experience while continuously evolving to meet the dynamic needs of the coding community.

The project emphasizes ongoing enhancements, with future goals including pre-training the model from scratch, experimenting with GPT-J, expanding language capabilities, and devising a custom loss function. GPT-CC is a collaborative initiative that aims to provide researchers and developers with a valuable resource to explore and understand the capabilities and limitations of large deep learning models trained specifically on code.

GPT-Code-Clippy is a powerful AI tool that can help you with typing tasks on macOS. It understands the context of what's on your screen and can assist with writing emails, using the terminal, and even team updates. You can download it right now, no waitlist.

Conclusion

Exploring alternatives to GitHub Copilot opens up a world of possibilities for developers. Each tool brings something unique to the table, whether it's enhanced privacy, seamless integration, or specialized features. By trying out different options, you can find the perfect fit for your coding needs and boost your productivity in exciting new ways. So, don't hesitate to experiment and discover the AI tool that works best for you!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot is an AI tool that helps you write code faster by suggesting lines or blocks of code as you type. It's like having a coding buddy who knows a lot about various programming languages.

How does Amazon CodeWhisperer work?

Amazon CodeWhisperer generates code suggestions in real-time as you write code in your development environment. It also scans your code for security issues and suggests fixes.

What features does Codeium offer?

Codeium provides features like intelligent autocomplete, an AI chatbot, and context-aware code generation. It aims to make coding faster and easier for developers.

Can Blackbox AI help with debugging?

Yes, Blackbox AI offers real-time suggestions for code completion, documentation, and debugging. It integrates with various developer tools to fit into your workflow easily.

Is Tabnine compatible with multiple programming languages?

Yes, Tabnine supports several programming languages, including Java, Python, and C++. It uses deep learning to offer intelligent code completion.

Are these AI tools free to use?

Some of these tools offer free versions with basic features, while others have premium versions with advanced functionalities. Always check their official websites for the most accurate pricing information.