GitHub Copilot

Best for: developers who want AI assistance inside the editor they already use, without changing tools or workflow.

GitHub Copilot provides contextualised assistance across the development lifecycle — inline code suggestions and chat in the IDE, code explanations, and answers drawn from documentation on GitHub. It runs in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, Vim, Eclipse, Xcode and Raycast, though chat is currently limited to VS Code, JetBrains and Visual Studio.

What makes it useful: you choose the model. Copilot exposes a selection of leading LLMs optimised for speed, accuracy or cost — including Claude, Haiku 4.5, GPT-5 mini and OpenAI Codex — so you can match the model to the task rather than accepting one vendor's default. GitHub reports developers using it are up to 55% more productive at writing code and report up to 75% higher job satisfaction.

Where it falls short: those productivity figures come from GitHub's own research, so weigh them accordingly. Suggestions still require review — confidently wrong code is the standard failure mode. The free tier caps at 2,000 completions per month, which serious daily use will exhaust quickly.

Pricing: Free ($0, 2,000 completions/month), Pro ($10/mo), Pro+ ($39/mo), Max ($100/mo with $200 monthly credits). Organisations: Business $19/user/mo, Enterprise $39/user/mo.