10 best AI coding assistants to level up your skills

Are you looking for the best AI coding assistant to speed up your productivity? Whether you’re working for clients, with a company, or on your own personal project, an AI coding assistant can help you avoid spending time on repetitive tasks like writing boilerplate template code or creating documentation.

For this guide, I’ve tested the best AI coding assistants for code optimization, refactoring, debugging, creating documentation, code completion, learning about code, fixing errors, and more. As a full-stack developer with several years of experience managing both solo and collaborative coding projects, I wanted to see how these tools perform in real-world scenarios. Here’s a quick comparison of my top picks. 

How we test AI coding assistants

When searching for the best AI coding assistant, it’s important to remember that everyone’s needs are different. What works for you as a junior freelance developer may not be what’s best for an enterprise team of senior developers.

There are some basic criteria I looked at when selecting which coding assistants to include:

• Multiple language support
• Integrations with popular integrated development environments (IDEs)
• Key capabilities such as debugging, refactoring, code optimization, and context awareness

The ability to understand natural language processing (NLP) commands was another must, as was transparency about its AI models. You should be able to ask the assistant questions about the code and get explanations for both existing code and new AI-generated code.

The top 10 coding assistants

That said, here are the best AI tools for code, starting with my favorite code assistant, GitHub Copilot. 

1. GitHub Copilot

Best for: Code autocompletions

You should know: GitHub Copilot is built into Visual Studio Code and integrates seamlessly with your GitHub repository (repo) to add context. 

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot for over a year, and it remains my favorite pair programmer and AI code helper. And it’s not just because I use VS Code a lot — it’s available in other IDEs as well. 

I find GitHub Copilot to be extremely useful for code autocompletions because it lets you cycle through multiple suggestions until you find the right fit. It’s also great for refactoring and debugging your code. If you don’t understand why your code is doing something wrong, the tool provides excellent code fixes and explanations via the chat functionality. It understands simple, natural language queries to help you find a solution.

In agent mode, the NLP-based AI can even build entire projects for you, run terminal commands, answer your coding questions, and help you debug code. But I’d caution against relying on it fully for complex projects, as it can make errors. Copilot also sometimes suggests duplicate code or even creates new duplicate files without deleting previous ones.

One of the best things about GitHub Copilot is that it integrates seamlessly with GitHub, taking your repo into context to make context-sensitive suggestions that align with your project goals. With paid collaborative features, users can share knowledge bases, providing better context-aware experiences with Copilot based on the entire team’s work. But you still may need to be explicit with your business goals and requirements for it to create well-refined code.

Pros:

• Coding AI assistant built into VS Code
• Can run terminal commands in agent mode
• Great for debugging
• Excellent for avoiding the need to write repetitive code
• PR agent automatically generates pull request descriptions
• Supports multiuser access for collaborative projects and code reviews 

Cons:

• Free version is limited
• Sometimes suggests incorrect fixes or doesn’t take the full context into account
• Microsoft may use code and data from free users to train its AI models

Plans/Pricing: 

• GitHub Copilot is free for 2,000 autocompletions and 50 chat requests a month. 
• The Pro plan costs $10 per month or $100 per year for unlimited access. 

G2 rating: 4.5/5

2. Augment

Best for: Working with large codebases

You should know: Augment does an excellent job of understanding your codebase. It learns from its mistakes and maintains a memory of important facts related to your project.

I really enjoyed working with Augment in VS Code. It’s great for picking up where others have left off when taking over a project, as it can analyze complex codebases and help users understand them better. The AI offers code completions that are heavily context-aware, conforming to your schema, code style, and previous chats. Augment even retains a memory base of important details related to your project, which you can view at any time.

Not only does Augment offer a coding agent mode — which can run terminal commands, create files, and build your app on autopilot — but it also offers a remote agent option that can independently work on connected GitHub repositories.

In my experience, when it comes to working with large projects and making multi-file edits, Augment is much better than other tools like Cursor and even GitHub Copilot. While other tools often create unnecessary files or make edits that don’t align across the codebase, Augment makes far fewer such errors.

Pros:

• Excellent at understanding complex codebases
• Perfect for large projects and multi-file edits
• Great for security
• Supports image sharing, allowing you to upload Figma files
• The first AI coding assistant to receive ISO/IEC 42001 certification

Cons:

• Uses your data for training on the free plan
• Quite expensive as you scale up
• Support leaves much room for improvement (long wait times, unanswered tickets, etc.)
• GitHub PR integration turns issues into pull requests (PRs)

Plans/Pricing:

• Augment is free for 50 messages a month.
• Choose from several paid plans: the Indie plan is $20 per month for 125 messages, the Developer plan is $50 per month for 600 messages, the Pro plan is $100 per month for 1,500 messages, and the Max plan is $250 per month for 2,500 messages.
• Top-ups cost $15 for an additional 100 messages on any plan.

G2 rating: No rating currently available

3. JetBrains AI Assistant

Best for: Repetitive tasks

You should know: The JetBrains AI Assistant and coding agent is built into all of JetBrains’ IDEs.

Whether you’re coding in JavaScript, Python, C#, or Go, JetBrains has an IDE for you, and JetBrains AI will ship with it automatically. The AI assistant fits beautifully into the user interface (UI).

Just choose a section of code, right-click, and select from a couple of premade AI prompts that allow you to quickly refactor your code, discover potential problems, create documentation, and more. You can also create your own custom prompts to make AI assistance even easier for repeat tasks, such as starting new chats for highlighted sections.

JetBrains AI is also great for creating commit messages to track changes, although you might need to be clear about your intentions rather than simply informing what the code in the commit does. For example, you might open the Commit tool window and ask the AI assistant to generate a comprehensive summary for more information or limit it to a shorter, more general commit message.

Pros:

• Great for speeding up repetitive and monotonous tasks like creating documentation or rewriting code
• Highly useful for refactoring and debugging
• Incredibly easy to use with an excellent UI
• Automatically creates commit messages
• Generates database queries to help users find the information they need from large databases

Cons:

• Even if you pay for Pro licensing for a JetBrains IDE, you’ll need to pay extra for the full version of JetBrains AI.
• When writing complex code or dealing with multiple files, it’s prone to errors.
• A JetBrains IDE can be resource-intensive and may be overkill for smaller projects.

Plans/Pricing: 

• The AI Free plan gives you unlimited code completions and local AI support but only limited cloud AI usage.
• The AI Pro plan costs $10 per month or $100 per year.
• The AI Ultimate plan, for power users, costs $30 per month or $300 per year. 

G2 rating: Not available

4. Continue.dev

Best for: Custom AI assistants

You should know: Continue.dev is the best tool for building custom AI assistants that are trained according to your rules and work with specific apps or model context protocols (MCPs).

Continue.dev is more than just an AI autocomplete tool for your IDE — it’s a way to create a highly customized AI assistant that’s fine-tuned to your organization’s needs. To ensure code quality is maintained and is up to your organization’s standards, you can add rules for your coding assistant or use built-in rule blocks.

Continue.dev has the highest range of large language models (LLMs) available. It supports local LLM models but works with popular models like OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Gemini too. It also offers select ready-made MCPs that seamlessly work with a wide range of tools, from Shopify to Jira to Exa.

I liked how you can create multiple AI assistants for different purposes — ideal if you work with different clients. This makes Continue.dev great for freelance developers who work on multiple projects.

Pros:

• Highly customizable AI assistant
• Ready-made blocks of rules, MCPs, etc., for plug and play
• Can create multiple AI assistants with different rules
• Open source
• Privacy-first architecture with ability to opt out of tracked tool interactions and code processing in local servers

Cons:

• Sometimes a bit buggy — for example, when I was signing in with VS Code, it redirected me to the browser login, which consistently failed to send a response to VS Code
• Not for beginners since you need to customize it to make it work well
• Autocomplete can be hit or miss

Plans/Pricing: 

• Continue.dev’s Solo plan is free and open source.
• A Team plan costs $10 per month per developer.
• With either plan, the Models Add-on gives you access to a variety of frontier models for an additional $20 per month per developer.

G2 rating: Not available

5. Blackbox.AI

Best for: High-level project planning

You should know: Blackbox.AI allows you to share your screen with the AI assistant if you need help with anything you’re working on.

Blackbox.AI is primarily a web-based coding assistant, but it also integrates with VS Code and JetBrains. It has a clean and easily navigable interface, with several specialized AI tools to help with app building, deep research, and step-by-step problem-solving.

The Blackbox app builder is particularly helpful for building a high-level development plan. The cloud interface code editor has a similar layout to VS Code, and you can sit back and watch the AI work in real time. I particularly liked that it will ask you whether you agree to the approaches it takes for framework, API selection, and feature selection.

We’ve already created a guide to help you decide between low-code vs no-code solutions, but it comes down to your experience. Low-code solutions like Blackbox.AI allow you to quickly generate code templates and files, which you can use to jump-start your projects or speed up your productivity.

Pros:

• App development and preview directly in your browser
• Fast code completion in VS Code
• Screen sharing with AI for help with anything you’re working on
• AI modes optimized for deep research, providing more resources in results for users
• Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) capabilities

Cons:

• Online code editor is a bit sluggish
• Errors and bugs are common
• Code efficiency could be improved

Plans/Pricing: 

• Pro plan pricing starts at $7.99 per month for standard usage, with a 90-day trial available.
• As you scale up in usage, you might need the Business plan at $14.99 per month.
• Ultimate plans provide custom solutions for teams, starting at $79.99 per month.

G2 rating: 4.4/5

6. Amp

Best for: Large enterprises

You should know: Amp is a new coding agent for enterprise users working on large projects.

Amp by Sourcegraph is an agentic coding AI solution designed for large teams and enterprises. It can be used not only as an IDE extension but also as a command-line interface (CLI) tool. This allows for more flexibility than most other AI agents, which typically come with their own code editors or are tied to specific IDEs.

One of Amp’s top features is its ability to search through your entire codebase, use it for context-rich suggestions, and implement multiple changes throughout your codebase at once. There’s no token limit or throttling for threads, so they won’t get interrupted early, and you can run multiple threads at the same time. There are also excellent team collaboration features, like sharing threads and leaderboards.

Since the tool is still relatively new, it does have some issues. Sometimes, for example, the context it uses is too broad — it might use context from your codebase or from other threads when it’s not appropriate and then suggest incorrect fixes.

Pros:

• Works on large codebases
• Runs multiple concurrent threads
• Is fully optimized for enterprise

Cons:

• No agent selection (Amp will select one for you)
• Steep learning curve
• Context is often too broad

Plans/Pricing: 

• The Amp individual plan comes with $10 of free usage credits towards at-cost pricing. You can top up from as low as $5 in usage credits based on your ongoing needs.
• Amp Teams plans are for small teams looking to view and share threads with at-cost pricing.

G2 rating: 4.5/5

7. Testomat.io

Best for: Efficient testing management

You should know: Testomat.io is an efficient testing manager solution that allows you to generate quick tests with the help of AI.

Quality assurance (QA) can often seem like a hassle. That’s where Testomat.io comes into play. Testomat.io helps streamline your QA process by allowing you to create and organize test cases, automatically run tests, generate test reports, and collaborate with your team.

It works with popular testing frameworks like Mocha, Chai, and Cucumber. Real-time test reports and analytics help you quickly identify and fix issues when running tests for large projects.

Testomat.io uses AI to suggest test cases, quickly create test code from descriptions, analyze test results, and more. The tool can also generate test case descriptions from code and analyze imported Jira issues to recommend new test cases or improve existing test coverage.

Pros:

• Excellent test case management
• AI does not retain your data
• Uses Groq (not Grok) with open-source AI models

Cons:

• Limited use cases — while great for QA assistance, can’t be used for code completion or code generation when writing code
• AI features still new and sometimes hit or miss
• Some spelling errors in the documentation

Plans/Pricing: 

• The Free plan allows two users and two projects.
• The Professional plan costs $30 per month per user and includes unlimited projects, analytics, free read-only users, a Jira plug-in, and more.
• Custom Enterprise plans are also available. 

G2 rating: 4.8/5

8. Codespell.ai

Best for: Beginners

You should know: Codespell.ai is a code assistant with a sleek and easy-to-navigate interface, making it perfect for beginners.

Codespell is an AI assistant available as an extension for VS Code, Visual Studio, and Eclipse. Its interface is stylish and a pleasure to use.

With its quick and easy prompts, I find Codespell is best for creating unit tests. You can create unit tests for specific methods or code snippets (ultra-beginners might want to read our guide on code snippets first) quickly. I also find it great with NLP prompts and for asking questions about code.

This AI tool is most useful for small tasks like generating unit tests and explaining code, rather than generating entire lines of code. It’s also best for common stacks, languages, and frameworks — think React, Node.js, .NET, Java, and JavaScript.

Pros:

• Easy-to-use, clean interface
• Great for generating unit tests
• Excellent at explaining code

Cons:

• Sometimes a bit slow to respond
• Only works with a few IDEs
• Works best with common frameworks like React, Node.js, and .NET

Plans/Pricing: 

• Codespell’s Starter plan for individuals is $15 per month or $144 per year.
• The Growth plan costs $24 per month or $240 per year and offers advanced features such as the ability to save prompts. Most of the advanced features have yet to be released.
• Enterprise plans start at $18 per month or $180 per year per user.

G2 rating: 4.5/5

9. ChatGPT

Best for: Browser-based coding assistance

You should know: ChatGPT Plus offers some of the best AI models available for code generation and debugging.

ChatGPT is a browser-based AI chatbot that’s also great at writing code. It’s best when you need to write specific files, methods, or classes. I also love ChatGPT for debugging. For example, when facing an error, I can simply copy the console error into ChatGPT, and it will give me several possible reasons for the issue and recommended fixes.

Even if the AI doesn’t always get things right during the first try, it can learn from its mistakes and provide alternative solutions in future prompts.

However, the difference between ChatGPT’s standard and more advanced models, such as GPT-4o, is staggering. GPT-4o is simply much better at writing efficient code than boilerplate templates and even at discovering solutions to complex algorithmic problems.

Pros:

• Quick and easy to use
• Mobile app access
• Great for finding solutions to errors

Cons:

• Not directly integrated into IDEs, although various extensions and tools give you access to its models in VS Code and other IDEs
• The free version’s model can sometimes get stuck or spit out boilerplate code
• No access to alternative models from companies like DeepSeek, Google, Microsoft, or Grok

Plans/Pricing: 

• ChatGPT is free to use.
• For extended access to the premium models, get the Plus plan for $20 per month.
• The Pro plan, which gives you unlimited access to all models and extended access to things like Sora video creation and deep research, costs $200 per month and is best for power users.

G2 rating: 4.7/5

10. Claude

Best for: Terminal-based AI coding

You should know: Claude Code works in your terminal, allowing you to interact with AI from your command-line interface.

Claude is a browser-based AI tool that’s pretty similar to ChatGPT. It offers a different LLM model, so if ChatGPT can’t figure out a solution to your problem, Claude should be your second stop. Another thing I like about Claude is that when you use it to generate code, you can actually view a rendered preview directly in your browser.

If you’re willing to sign up for Claude Pro, you’ll get access to advanced Claude models in the browser, as well as Claude Code, an agentic code assistant powered by Claude’s latest models that takes your coding beyond the browser.

You can interact with Claude Code from your terminal. It explores your codebase to make context-aware fixes, integrates with GitHub to turn issues into PRs, and integrates with MCP servers. 

Pros:

• Claude offers live in-browser code editing and previews
• Claude has some of the best AI models for coding, including Sonnet 4
• Claude Code works with your CLI and VS Code

Cons:

• You’re limited to Claude models
• The free version doesn’t give you access to the best models
• The free version doesn’t offer access to Claude Code

Pricing: 

• Claude is free to use.
• A Pro plan offers everyday access to premium models and Claude Code for $17 per month.
• Max plans, with either 5x or 20x more usage than the Pro plan, start at $100 per month and provide early access to advanced features and priority access during high-traffic times.

G2 rating: 4.4/5

Work smarter with AI coding assistants

AI coding agents can help you get more done in less time, even as a junior developer or someone with minimal coding skills. If you have zero coding knowledge whatsoever, I’d suggest looking into no-code tools, which allow you to build entire websites and apps in minutes without any previous programming experience.

Looking for a no-code way to harness the power of AI to catapult your business to the next level? With over 7,000 agent templates, Jotform AI Agents allow you to streamline tasks like staff hiring and customer support so you can focus on what matters most.