Best AI Tools for Developers
Focused on tools that speed up real development work — in-editor completion, codebase-wide review, and full AI-native editing — rather than novelty coding demos. Each entry below covers a distinct part of a typical workflow (writing code, reviewing it, prototyping quickly, and documenting decisions) rather than five overlapping ways to do the same thing, so most developers will only need two or three of these at once. None of these replace understanding what the generated code actually does — treat AI-written code the same way you'd treat a pull request from a junior contributor, and review it before merging.
See our scoring methodology for how these picks are evaluated.
Top pick
GitHub Copilot
AI code completion and chat, built into popular code editors.
Read the full review →Comparison table
| Tool | Pricing | Free plan | API | Why it's here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | Freemium | Yes | Yes | The most widely adopted in-editor AI completion tool, working as an extension across VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim and more without requiring you to change editors. |
| Cursor | Freemium | Yes | No | For developers who want the deepest possible AI integration — built specifically for codebase-wide context and multi-step agent tasks — and are open to using a dedicated editor. |
| Claude | Freemium | Yes | Yes | Frequently used for focused code review and reasoning through complex bugs, particularly in large files or codebases where careful, step-by-step analysis matters. |
| Replit | Freemium | Yes | Yes | Best for fast prototyping without local environment setup, useful for quick proofs of concept or teaching contexts. |
| Notion AI | Freemium | Yes | Yes | Not a coding tool itself, but useful for drafting technical specs, PRDs and documentation directly inside the workspace many dev teams already use for planning — pairing well with any of the four coding-focused tools above. |
| Gemini | Freemium | Yes | Yes | Available via Google AI Studio and Vertex AI for developers who want to experiment with or integrate Gemini models directly into their own applications, separate from the consumer chat app. |
Best free option
GitHub Copilot has a genuine free plan among the tools on this list — see its page for exactly what's included.
How to choose
Start with your constraint that matters most: budget (see the free plan column above), a specific platform you need to work on, or a specific feature. Read the individual tool page for anything you're seriously considering — pricing and features change, and each page shows a last-verified date.
Frequently asked questions
- What's the best tool on this list?
- GitHub Copilot is our top pick, but "best" depends on your specific need — see the comparison table above for how each tool differs.
- How do you decide what makes this list?
- Pricing transparency, feature completeness, platform availability and real-world usefulness, evaluated against our published methodology.