GitHub Copilot Alternatives 2026: six assistants, real price points
How this page was built
Six vendors, six official pricing pages, a recorded date for each row. Two caveats are written into the table rather than left out: Google’s Gemini Code Assist page is rendered by JavaScript and geo-gated, so its team price comes from Google’s own published list via third-party trackers and is marked approximate; Kiro replaced Amazon Q Developer in the IDE role, which is why Q Developer does not appear as a separate option.
We have not benchmarked the six on the same task. Everything below is the vendors’ own published pricing and quota structure, read on the date shown.
The six, side by side
| Tool | Free tier | Entry paid price | How usage is metered | Recorded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | $0 for individuals | Pro $10/mo; Pro+ $39/mo; Max $100/mo; Business $19/seat; Enterprise $39/seat | Two tracks: base credits plus a flex allotment, one credit = $0.01 | 2026-09-30 |
| Cursor | $0 | Plus $8/mo (Grok models only); Premium $30; Super $100; Ultra $200; Teams $30+/user | One shared AI usage pool, refreshes weekly, top-ups billed | 2026-10-31 |
| Windsurf | $0 with a light agent quota | Pro $20/mo; Max $200/mo; Teams $80/mo + $40 per seat | Daily and weekly agent quotas, not credits | 2026-09-30 |
| Replit | $0 starter | Core $20/mo ($18 annual); Pro $100/mo ($90 annual) | Plan-based; Pro includes $100 of model credits | 2026-10-27 |
| Gemini Code Assist | $0 individual tier | Standard approx $19/user/mo annual, $22.80 monthly (third-party figure) | Per-user licence, not metered usage | 2026-10-27 |
| Kiro | 50 credits/mo | Pro $20 (1,000 credits); Pro+ $40; Pro Max $100; Power $200 | Agent-work credits; a full spec run burns 15-25; overage $0.04/credit | 2026-09-30 |
Copilot’s own meter is the thing people miss
Copilot Pro is $10 a month, and that figure is on every listicle. What those lists rarely say is that agent usage runs on a second meter: each plan carries base credits plus a flex allotment, so Pro+ effectively reaches $70 and Max reaches $200 in monthly credits, with one credit worth a cent. Budget on the credit line, not the subscription line, once you start using agents rather than completions.
Cursor: cheapest seat, narrowest models
Plus at $8 is the cheapest paid seat in this group, and it is cheap for a stated reason: Plus is limited to Grok models. Premium at $30 opens the model set and adds cloud agents, code hosting and AI review; Ultra at $200 raises the pool. Every tier shares one usage pool across chat, agents and voice, refreshing weekly, with top-ups for the rest of the period.
If your work is mostly single-file editing with occasional agent runs, the $8 tier is a real option. If you want Claude or GPT-class models inside the editor, you are buying Premium, and the price gap to Copilot Pro disappears.
Windsurf and Kiro: quotas instead of credits
Both sell agent work by quota rather than by credit, which makes the bill predictable but the value harder to compare. Windsurf Pro at $20 carries daily and weekly quotas and access to several model families; Max at $200 raises them. Kiro Pro at $20 gives 1,000 credits, and a full spec run costs 15-25 of them — roughly 40 to 60 spec runs a month, with overage at four cents.
The practical difference: Kiro’s number is legible (you can count runs), Windsurf’s is not (you get told when the quota resets). If you expense AI tooling and need a defensible line item, quotas beat credits; if you want headroom on a heavy day, credits beat quotas.
Replit and Gemini Code Assist: the non-editor options
Replit is the only option here that also hosts what you build: Core at $20 ($18 annual) with a browser IDE, chat and parallel agents, Pro at $100 ($90 annual) with $100 of model credits. It is the right pick when the deploy target is the same product as the editor.
Gemini Code Assist is cheapest per team seat on paper — roughly $19 per user per month on an annual commitment, $22.80 monthly — with a free individual tier. Treat the team figure as approximate: Google’s page renders by script and region, so we are quoting Google’s published list as relayed by pricing trackers, and the exact number should be confirmed at purchase.
What we left out
We did not include tools without a checked price page: Codeium’s successor products, Tabnine, Sourcegraph Cody, Continue and Aider are all cited in comparison posts. We also excluded Amazon Q Developer as a separate entry because it has closed to new signups and Kiro took its IDE role.
No benchmark table appears here because we have not run the same repository through six assistants. A speed table built on other people’s screenshots would be worse than no table.
FAQ
Is GitHub Copilot’s free tier enough? For an individual doing ordinary completions, the free tier is real. It is not enough for agent work, which is metered and capped.
Which alternative is cheapest per month? Cursor Plus at $8, but it only includes Grok models. Copilot Pro at $10 and Kiro or Windsurf Pro at $20 are the next steps up.
Do any of them include hosting? Replit does. The others are editor-side tools.
How current are these prices? Each row carries the date we recorded it, between September 30 and October 31, 2026. Google’s team pricing is marked approximate because its pricing page did not render for us.