GitHub Copilot is an artificial intelligence tool developed by OpenAI and GitHub to transform how you write code. Specifically, it suggests code completions when you write a code or when you provide a natural language description of what you would like the code to do.
GitHub Copilot supports various programming languages, such as Ruby, JavaScript, Go, Python, and more. It caters to the varying needs of developers in different technology stacks.
Copilot is compatible with various Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Neovim.
The GitHub ecosystem and community have worldwide developers improve Copilot by creating plugins, giving feedback, and sharing various experiences.
GitHub Copilot has three paid plans: Copilot Individual at $10 per month, Copilot Business at $19 per user per month, and Copilot Enterprise at $39 per user per month. The free plan only works for teachers, students, and users who maintain popular open-source projects.
GitHub Copilot alternatives include CodeGPT, Amazon CodeWhisperer, Tabnine, Kodezi, Codeium, and more.
Out of these alternatives, Amazon CodeWhisperer stands out as the best because it works with several programming languages, is secure, has an interactive AI assistant, has a simple interface, and helps you avoid plagiarism.
Why Explore GitHub Copilot Alternatives?
While Copilot is popular for providing AI-powered code completions and suggestions, here are some of the reasons you might want to explore its alternatives.
GitHub Copilot is expensive; you will need a paid plan to benefit from it. There’s a free plan, but it’s only limited to students, teachers, and open-source project maintainers. If you are a casual user who doesn’t fit into these categories, you will have to look elsewhere.
Copilot uses your comments and code to provide suggestions, increasing the possibility of security loopholes or privacy leaks. Similar open-source tools provide more transparency and allow you more data control.
This tool does not let you do more beyond code completion. It lacks crucial features related to coding, such as code translation, code documentation, and code refactoring.
Copilot primarily integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio. It is not compatible with popular editors like sublime Text, IntelliJ IDEA, and PyCharm. So, if you are looking for a flexible workflow, you will need another tool.
Besides, there are concerns regarding Copilot’s contribution to code plagiarism and other ethical issues regarding the training data used. Finding a tool that uses a transparent and open-source development process may address such concerns.
All this and more necessitates some users to look for GitHub Copilot alternatives, some of which we have mentioned above.
Let’s now learn more about them.
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Best GitHub Copilot Free Alternatives
1. Tabnine
Tabnine is a code completion plugin supporting popular libraries, frameworks, and languages in most Integrated Development Environments.
This tool’s AI models are trained using permissive open-source code, meaning no one can access or use your code.
Tabnine’s outstanding feature is the ability to use your code to train a private AI model and get custom code completions that reflect your patterns and style. In other words, you only use code written in your repositories and don’t have to depend on code created by other people.
Training and hosting your own AI model fosters collaborative auto-completion for a team. It also improves code security because you can keep the AI model and codebase on your corporate servers.
Additionally, Tabnine requires less context than GitHub Copilot when generating your code. You can use it to generate midline suggestions while typing instead of mere code suggestions for the next line after writing the previous line.
Tabnine has a free, Basic Plan that supports short code completion. The Pro Plan costs $12 per user per month and the Enterprise Plan costs $39 per user per month.
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2. Captain Stack
Captain Stack is a Visual Studio code extension that provides code suggestions like GitHub Copilot, but it works slightly differently.
Instead of leveraging AI, it pulls relevant suggestions from Stack Overflow. Thus, its suggestions come from seasoned developers and real-world coding solutions.
Captain Stack allows for more control and transparency; you will see each suggestion’s source, helping you understand the code’s purpose and context. As a result, you can make informed decisions and skip the black box effect commonly attributed to AI models.
As an open-source tool, Captain Stack has an active community that regularly creates additional features and fixes bugs.
Developers of all levels can use Captain Stack entirely free, unlike Copilot which comes with subscription fees.
Besides, this tool integrates with editors, such as Sublime Text, VSCode, and Atom, giving you more flexibility in terms of code generation.
3. CodeGPT
CodeGPT is OpenAI’s large language model trained on a vast dataset of text and code. Its AI-powered features allow developers to generate code snippets in various programming languages using prompts.
It suggests blocks and lines of code that you can use for code completion, saving time.
CodeGPT can translate code from one programming language to another, allowing programmers to operate with other languages.
If you don’t know what a block of code means or does, CodeGPT can provide code explanation, enhancing more understanding.
It can produce documentation and comments for code, making it easy to maintain and read the code.
CodeGPT also makes it easy to identify and suggest fixes for various coding errors that can help minimize errors and enhance code quality.
While GitHub Copilot mainly focuses on code completion, CodeGPT has more functionalities, including code generation, code running and compilation, code autocompletion, code documentation, code refactoring, and unit testing.
You can use Code-GPT’s free plan for 10 days or subscribe to its paid plans: Basic Plan ($9.99/mo), Standard Plan ($19.99/mo), and Gold Plan ($49.99/mo). Each of the paid plans has a free trial.
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4. Codeium
Codeium is one of the best GitHub Copilot free alternatives that provide AI-powered code autocompletion in more than twenty programming languages, such as JS, Java, Python, TS, C/C++, Go, and more.
This tool generates rapid code suggestions, saving you the time required to search for documentation and APIs, write unit tests and boilerplates, and other repetitive tasks.
Codeium is trained to generate or suggest billions of lines of code to streamline your workflow and let you improve your coding skills.
This free code completion tool lets you engage in natural language interaction to help with code translation, debugging, code generation, code concept explanation, documentation generation, and refactoring.
You can use it as a testing assistant to write and produce test cases for improved code functionality and quality, identify possible edge cases and weak points, and suggest test cases derived from your code.
If you are looking for a privacy-focused coding tool, then you will like Codeium. It doesn’t store your code or share it with a third party. Besides, code is processed locally to improve security. Copilot is known to collect and share data.
Anyone can access Codeium for free. Being an open-source tool allows the community to improve and customize it.
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5. Amazon CodeWhisperer
Amazon CodeWhisperer is an AI code generator that gives code recommendations instantly. While writing code, the coding assistant automatically provides suggestions that hinge on your existing comments and code.
Amazon CodeWhisperer uses Amazon Q, an interactive AI assistant, within your Interactive Development Environment to provide expert guidance in a conversational interface.
Using Amazon Q, you can initiate a conversation to help grasp a project code via natural dialogue. You can also use it to migrate and upgrade the code to an up-to-date version within minutes.
Besides, you can ask this assistant for personalized suggestions related to code optimization, debugging, adding unit tests, and more.
CodeWhisperer can filter or flag any code suggestions that are similar to public code. You will see a substitute URL for an open-source repository and licensing.
You can then review the details and include a relevant attribution. This feature helps to eliminate plagiarism issues that are rampant when using GitHub Copilot to generate code.
What’s more, you can scan the code to detect hard-to-find security loopholes and find suggestions to address the detected issues.
Amazon CodeWhisperer works with 15 programming languages, including PyCharm, VS Code, AWS Cloud9, Java, JavaScript, IntelliJ IDEA, and more.
You can use the Always Free plan to enjoy the many features of Amazon CodeWhisperer.
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6. GPT-Code-Clippy (GPT-CC)
GPT-Code-Clippy is an open-source project aimed at creating a free and community-driven GitHub Copilot alternative.
Like Copilot, it leverages the GPT-Neo model, but with a primary focus on user control and transparency.
It generates code suggestions in Python and JavaScript and is trained on a dataset of GitHub’s public code to ensure conformity with standard coding practices.
GPT-Code-Clippy’s code, training data, and model are open-source to encourage community-based contributions, moderation, and customization.
Thus, you can fine-tune the model for your particular coding needs and tasks. In fact, GPT-Code-Clippy offers more customization than GitHub Copilot.
This free coding assistant gives you control and privacy over your data; you can run it locally on your device or self-host it.
7. Kodezi
Kodezi is another GitHub Copilot alternative that makes developers more productive by helping them craft quality code quickly.
Kodezi analyzes billions of open-source code lines from well-known repositories and blends them with the cutting-edge algorithms of GPT-3.
Kodezi’s debugging feature lets you identify and resolve coding errors, saving you time when creating various projects.
If you have lines of code that need restructuring to make them more efficient, cleaner, and light-weight, you can use Kodezi to restructure them.
You can use this tool to automatically generate your code’s documentation for better readability and communication.
It’s a language converter, as well, allowing you to translate your code from one programming language to another. Its code conversion functionality supports 30 languages, including Python, C, C++, JavScript, and Java, just to name a few.
As a new user, you can enjoy Kodezi’s for free, and if you like it, you can subscribe to the Pro plan and pay $6.99 per month. If you are a team, you should contact Kodezi for a quote.
8. Cody
Cody is an AI-based coding assistant that will answer questions associated with your code, describe what the code does (in detail and at a high level), and help you fine-tune and debug the code.
Besides, Cody can translate your code to various languages and generate new lines of code. It supports code navigation too, helping you locate components and functions from the codebase.
This GitHub Copilot can detect code smells, pending errors, and possible bugs. If your team has made many changes to the code, you can use Cody to summarize all the latest changes.
If you want to generate new code using the power of AI, simply ask Cody to do it. The same applies to unit tests.
Cody’s most outstanding feature is the ability to fix inline code. The tool can improve and tweak code directly if you provide it with inline instructions.
The similarity between Cody and GitHub Copilot is that both tools can suggest the next code as you code (auto-completion).
You can use Cody completely free. The Pro plan costs $9 per month.
9. Bito AI
Bito AI is a coding assistant that relies on AI to help developers write better code and enhance productivity.
Bito AI supports code completion by providing code suggestions in your favorite IDE (Integrated Development Environment), encouraging more efficient code writing.
The coding assistant has a high understanding of any code and can analyze your codebase to give suggestions that fit your context accurately.
Bito AI lets you engage with its AI feature that has a massive memory allowing you to ask any question and receive contextual responses.
Improving your code performance is possible via the AI Code Improve feature that provides step-by-step guidelines to achieve the same.
It can also check your code and ensure it follows the coding style standards and makes it readable and consistent.
Bito AI prioritizes data security. They don’t copy, view, or store your code. Additionally, they offer data encryption all the time. This feature gives Bito AI an edge over GitHub Copilot which collects and shares your data.
Bito AI has a Forever Free Plan with many useful features.
However, you can switch to their 10X Developer Plan for additional features at $15 per user per month.
10. YouCompleteMe
YouCompleteMe is a code-completion engine for a text editor known as Vim. It supports different languages, including Java, Python, JavaScript, C/C++, C#, Rust, Go, and more.
It is a free and open-source coding engine that works using the omnipresent system. It can identify usual coding errors, such as typos and missing semicolons.
You can also use it for quicker identifier completion, path, and file suggestions.
Furthermore, YouCompleteMe provides code formatting and lets you create the documentation for various coding methods and functions.
YouCompleteMe features two completion engines. The first one is the identifier-based engine compatible with all programming languages.
The second engine is a semantic or Clang-based engine offering code completion for languages like Objective-C, C++, C, CUDA, and more. This engine has features like auto-triggers while typing, quick response times, and outcome-based completion.
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Conclusion
Out of the best GitHub Copilot free alternatives above, Amazon CodeWhisperer carries the day.
It provides real-time autosuggestions when you are typing a line of code and it has a conversational AI assistant to explain the project code in a natural language.
In case of suggestions that contain public code, the tool suggests a link to open-source alternatives.
It also works with 15 languages, a feature you won’t find on most code assistants. Additionally, it can identify security vulnerabilities in any piece of code and provide suggestions to resolve the issues.
