GitHub Copilot vs Zed
GitHub Copilot (GitHub (Microsoft)) and Zed (Zed Industries) side by side on public data, as of Oct 6, 2026.
Zed shipped 23 stable releases in the past 90 days.
Side-by-side numbers
| Metric | GitHub Copilot | Zed |
|---|---|---|
| Pulse Score | 70 | 59 |
| Overall rank | #9 | #19 |
| Downloads, last 7 days | — | — |
| Downloads, 7-day change | — | — |
| Downloads, 30-day change | — | — |
| VS Code installs | 78.6M | — |
| Marketplace rating | 2.8 / 5 (395) | — |
| GitHub stars | — | 91.3K |
| Homebrew installs, 30 days | — | 4,155 |
| Hacker News mentions, 30 days | 75 | 91 |
| Latest stable release | — | 1.22.0 · 6d ago |
| Stable releases, 90 days | 23 | |
| Terminal-Bench (best run) | — | — |
| Price | Free + $10/mo | Free + $10/mo |
| License | Proprietary | GPL-3.0-or-later |
| First released | June 2021 | — |
| Interfaces | IDE plugin, CLI, Web, Mobile, Desktop app, Slack, GitHub | Desktop IDE |
| Models | Selectable models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others (Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol were added in Sept 2026); Pro+ and Max can also delegate tasks to third-party agents such as Claude and OpenAI Codex. | Zed-hosted models (a GPT-6 Luna trial is offered) plus your own API keys (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and others) and external agents such as Claude Agent and Codex CLI. |
Trends
GitHub Copilot
AI coding assistant from GitHub offering completions, chat and agent mode in IDEs, a terminal CLI, a desktop app and a cloud agent that works on assigned tasks in the background and opens pull requests. Models from several providers can be selected.
Pricing: Free; Pro $10/mo; Pro+ $39/mo; Max $100/mo; Business $19/seat/mo; Enterprise $39/seat/mo; free for verified students. Plans include monthly GitHub AI Credits (Pro 1,500, Pro+ 7,000, Max 20,000 credits) that chat, agent mode, the cloud agent, CLI and code review draw on.
Zed
High-performance open-source code editor written in Rust, with multiplayer editing, an agent panel, edit predictions and support for external agents through the Agent Client Protocol. Version 1.0 shipped in April 2026.
Pricing: Personal $0 (2,000 accepted edit predictions; unlimited with your own API keys or external agents); Pro $10/mo (unlimited edit predictions, $5 of tokens included, usage billing beyond); Business $30/seat/mo.
Latest release 1.22.0:
- Added an optional model parameter to spawnagent to choose a model for that spawn instead of using the configured subagent model or inheriting the parent model, with the active model shown in its…
- Added BYOK support for GPT-6.1 Sol with an OpenAI API key. (#64968; thanks ktKongTong)
- Added Grok 4.7 to the SuperGrok and xAI providers and made it their recommended default. (#64567; thanks raphaelluethy)
- Added the agent.threadssidebar.autoopen setting to control whether opening a folder in an existing window also opens the Threads Sidebar. (#64259, #64395; thanks jackhwalters and joshkent94)