20 AI Coding Tools and Assistants to Know

Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we work, and software development is no exception. AI-powered coding assistants can provide intelligent code completion, flag bugs and errors, offer suggestions for improvement and translate from one programming language to another in a matter of seconds. Some can even generate code automatically, and offer code explanations in plain language.

Below are some of the most popular AI coding assistants on the market today. These tools are revolutionizing the way software is created, and are rapidly becoming an essential part of the modern developer’s toolkit.

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20 AI Coding Tools and Assistants to Know

1. GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is a code completion tool created by GitHub and OpenAI. Available as a subscription to both individual developers and businesses, Copilot can generate code from scratch and correct errors in existing code, as well as describe input code in plain language and translate code between different programming languages. Because it has been trained on such an extensive corpus of open source code repositories, it supports just about every programming language available to the public. The tool is also equipped with a chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model (LLM), enabling users to converse with Copilot in real-time and ask questions about their code.

• Pricing: Ranges from $10/month for individual users to $39/month for enterprise users.

2. Amazon Q Developer

Previously known as CodeWhisperer, Amazon Q Developer is ideal for users working on projects within Amazon Web Services, providing in-line code suggestions and completions, as well as potential open source code matches for easier review, in popular integrated development environments (IDEs) like JetBrains, Visual Studio and VS Code. The software also scans for potential security vulnerabilities and suggests immediate patches using generative AI. Q Developer integrates natively with all other AWS tools and services, and supports 15 programming languages, including Python, Java, C# and SQL. 

• Pricing: Free for individual use. The Pro plan for businesses is $19/month per user.

3. Tabnine

Tabnine offers code completion services in more than two-dozen programming languages and IDEs. It can be used to generate code, turn natural language into code (and vice versa), test code and fix bugs. It also learns from users’ individual coding patterns and style, using deep learning methods to make its suggestions more accurate and personalized over time. Tabnine is available either online through the cloud or offline with a local AI model. All of its models are trained exclusively on open source code, meaning the code it generates isn’t copyrighted and other developers can use it freely. 

• Pricing: Ranges from $19/month for individuals and small teams to $39/month for larger businesses. Users can also test the product for free for 90 days.

4. Gemini in Android Studio

Gemini in Android Studio (previously known as Studio Bot) is a coding assistant built specifically for developers working in the Android ecosystem. Powered by Google’s Gemini LLM, the tool integrates into the Android Studio IDE, providing users with code completion and generation capabilities, as well as error explanations and fixes. Users can also ask questions that are specific to their project, and Gemini will remember the context of the conversation so that they can ask follow-up questions later on.

• Pricing: Free. 

5. Watsonx Code Assistant

IBM’s watsonx Code Assistant provides AI-generated code recommendations based on both natural language inputs and existing source code. Designed primarily for the tech giant’s enterprise clients, this tool is offered as two separate products: watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Light Speed, which helps write code to manage and automate the operation of servers, cloud services and other IT infrastructure using plain language text inputs; and watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which helps developers modernize old or outdated applications with better code. The entire Code Assistant product is powered by IBM’s Granite model, an LLM specifically designed for coding.

• Pricing: Costs vary depending on business size, model capabilities, usage and other factors. IBM also offers a free trial of a “lite” version of its watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Light Speed product.

6. ChatGPT

ChatGPT has become a popular tool among software developers, even though it was not initially created to be a coding assistant. The chatbot can generate code in variety of programming languages, ranging from C# to Java. It can also be used to debug code, translate code from one language to another and answer coding-related questions. Since coding assistance is not ChatGPT’s primary purpose, its abilities are more general in nature compared to tools that were specifically designed to help with coding. It can get things wrong and may have security vulnerabilities, so it should be used with caution.

• Pricing: Free for individuals. Plans for larger teams and more advanced capabilities range between $20/month and $30/month.

7. Code Llama

Built on top of Meta’s Llama 2 LLM, Code Llama can generate code, provide plain language code explanations and debug code — and all in popular languages like Python, C++, Java and Bash. The tool comes in different versions depending on the task: general-purpose Code Llama, Code Llama Python for Python-related tasks and Code Llama Instruct for instruction-based coding. It also comes in four different sizes (ranging from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters), providing users with options depending on the job they want to perform and the speed at which they want to perform. Because Llama 2 is open source, all of Code Llama’s training recipes are available on GitHub, as well as its model weights.

• Pricing: Free for both research and commercial use.

8. Amazon CodeGuru Security

Amazon CodeGuru Security uses machine learning and automated reasoning to help developers identify security vulnerabilities in their code, provide recommendations on how to fix those vulnerabilities and track the status of the vulnerabilities until they are complete. It also has a Profiler feature to help users find the most expensive lines of code in their application, and then remove code inefficiencies to improve performance and decrease compute costs. Users can associate their existing code repositories on sites like GitHub, Bitbucket or AWS CodeCommit in the CodeGuru console.

• Pricing: Free for the first 90 days (up to 100k lines of code). After that it costs $10/month (or $10 per 100k lines of code).

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9. Replit AI

Replit AI is a coding assistant built on top of Replit’s cloud-based IDE, providing real-time code completion, generation and error-highlighting services, as well as pair programming with its chatbot. Because the tool is specifically designed to be used on Replit’s platform, it can offer suggestions and optimizations that have been fine-tuned for languages and frameworks supported by Replit. The company says Replit AI performs best with JavaScript and Python code, but it supports 16 programming languages in total, including Bash, C#, Go, HTML and Rust.

• Pricing: Limited version is free. Core, a more advanced version for individual users, costs $10/month. A version for teams costs $33/month per user.

10. CodeWP

CodeWP provides AI-powered coding assistance specifically for WordPress, one of the most popular platforms for building websites. Supporting both experienced developers and non-techie web creators, the tool allows users to generate lines of code, code snippets and plugins by simply describing what they want in natural language text prompts. It also offers suggestions for improvement when users write their own code. CodeWP’s language model has been fine-tuned on WordPress-specific use cases, and it can even create code for popular plugins like WooCommerce, a platform millions of small businesses use to sell directly to customers from their websites.

• Pricing: The starter plan is free, the Pro plan costs $18/month, and the Agency plan for advanced collaboration costs $48/month.

11. Figstack

Figstack is designed for anyone who programs, whether they be developers, students or entrepreneurs. Trained with billions of lines of code, the tool allows users to read and write code across multiple programming languages, and can explain what code means in natural language. It also has features to help users translate code from one language to another, write more readable documentation for their functions and optimize the efficiency of their code.

• Pricing: Figstack offers a free trial, then charges $10/month for individuals.

12. DeepCode AI

Offered by cybersecurity company Snyk, DeepCode AI is a cloud-based code analysis tool that can automatically detect and fix security bugs in AI-generated lines of code as they are written in the IDE. First, it scans a given source code, then the code is parsed and compared to Snyk’s existing knowledge base of more than 25 million data flow cases. When vulnerable code is detected, its LLM sends fix options back to DeepCode AI to choose the best fix, which can then be reviewed and approved by human developers. All told, the tool supports nearly a dozen programming languages and can be integrated with several popular IDEs, including JetBrains, Visual Studio and Eclipse.

• Pricing: Free for individual developers and small teams. Paid plans for larger teams and enterprise clients start at $25/month per Snyk product.

13. Sourcery

Sourcery is an AI-powered code reviewer that can help developers write cleaner and more efficient code by identifying errors and removing any duplicate code in real time. It can review any pull request on any GitHub repository, providing line-by-line suggestions and comments, a summary of all the changes it has made and high-level feedback for future improvements. Sourcery also allows users to set their own instructions on how specific code fragments should be handled.

• Pricing: Free to use for all public repositories and open source projects. For private repositories, users can try Sourcery for free for 14 days, but need a Pro ($10/month) or Team ($30/month per user) after the trial period ends. 

14. AlphaCode 2

AlphaCode 2 is a tool developed by Google’s AI research lab DeepMind to assist with code generation and other programming tasks. Powered by the Gemini Pro LLM and fine-tuned on coding contest data, AlphaCode 2 can understand programming challenges involving “complex” math and theoretical computer science, according to Google. It is also capable of dynamic programming, which entails simplifying convoluted problems by breaking them down into simpler, overlapping sub-problems. In a subset of programming competitions hosted by Codeforces, the tool reportedly outperformed 85 percent of competitors on average, ranking it between the Expert and Candidate Master categories on the platform. While AlphaCode 2 is not available to the public yet, DeepMind has hinted that it may be integrated into a product in the future.

• Pricing: Not available.

15. Claude

Claude is a chatbot developed by Anthropic designed to generate more responsible and ethical text content. As a pair programmer, Claude can identify errors, suggest improvements, and generate code in various languages, with a particular proficiency in Python. In fact, Claude Opus, the chatbot’s most advanced LLM, achieved an 84.9 percent on the Codex HumanEval Python coding test. But, like ChatGPT, Claude was not explicitly designed to be a coding assistant, so its abilities are more general and it is capable of making mistakes.

• Pricing: Limited plan is free. Plans for more advanced capabilities and larger teams range between $20/month to $30/month per user.

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16. CodeT5+

CodeT5+ is a family of open source language models that can assist in a range of code understanding and generation tasks, including text-to-code generation, code auto-completion and code summarization. Created by AI researchers at software giant Salesforce, CodeT5+ can be deployed as an AI-powered coding assistant for software developers, and can be integrated with other open source LLMs like StarCoder and Llama to learn from their unique language understanding capabilities.

• Pricing: Free.

17. CodeParrot

CodeParrot is a design-to-code tool that uses AI to convert components from Figma files and screenshots into production-ready code. It can be used to code user interface components, write business logic, perform end-to-end testing and several other programming tasks — and all while learning an individual developer’s coding preferences over time. For now, CodeParrot only supports the Visual Studio Code IDE, but it supports all major frameworks, including React, Vue and Angular, as well as libraries like Tailwind. 

• Pricing: First 10 sessions are free, then it costs $19/month.

18. AskCodi

AskCodi is known for its ability to understand and respond to natural language queries, providing instant answers and code snippets to help developers get through coding challenges. It also comes equipped with several specialized features, including a code generation tool, a bug detector, a code explainer, a language translator and a tool to help refactor existing code. It even has a tool that allows users to convert visual designs into functional code. AskCodi supports more than 65 programming languages, and integrates with popular IDEs like PyCharm, Visual Studio Code and Sublime.

• Pricing: Limited plan is free. Paid plans include a Premium plan for $8.33/month and an Ultimate plan for $24.99/month.

19. Metabob

Metabob is an AI code reviewer that detects, explains and fixes errors and bugs in code created by both AI and humans, using proprietary graph neural networks to spot problems and LLMsI to explain and resolve them. It has been trained on millions of bug fixes performed by real developers, allowing it to identify hundreds of logical problems, ranging from race conditions to unhandled edge cases. Metabob supports Python, Javascript, Java, Typescript C++ and C, and is available on sites like GitHub, Bitbucket, VS Code and Gitlab.

• Pricing: Free for individual developers on VS Code, $20/month per user for teams on source control management repository accounts. Enterprises with self-hosted deployments have to contact Metabob for pricing. 

20. Cody

Cody is a tool provided by code intelligence platform Sourcegraph. Leveraging advanced search and codebase context, the coding assistant can autocomplete single lines of code or entire code functions in any programming language, configuration file or documentation, according to the company. It also specializes in code review and documentation, analyzing code in the context of an entire project so that it can provide detailed code explanations, identify bugs, suggest improvements and answer questions specific to a particular project. Cody supports several of the latest LLMs, including Claude 3, GPT-4 Turbo and Mixtral 8x7B, and can be integrated into an organization’s own LLM key with Amazon Bedrock and Azure OpenAI.

• Pricing: Limited plan is free, the Pro plan for professional developers and small teams costs $9/month per user and the Enterprise plan for large teams and companies costs $19/month per user.

Frequently Asked Questions