5 GitHub Copilot Alternatives You Can Try Today

Code assistant tools have become indispensable assets for developers worldwide. GitHub Copilot is a popular AI-powered coding assistant that can help you write code faster. There are many other GitHub Copilot alternatives offering similar features and unique advantages.

These alternatives include Replit’s GhostWriter, CodeGeex, and Captain Stack. Regardless of your needs or priorities, there’s an AI code assistant for you.

Ghostwriter is an AI-powered code completion tool built into the Replit IDE. It uses OpenAI’s Codex to generate code suggestions based on your current code, cursor position, and project context.

Ghostwriter can help you code at the speed of thought. It can also help you write better code by suggesting more idiomatic code that’s consistent with your project’s style guide.

Ghostwriter supports various programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, and Go. It offers many features, including code suggestion, code autocompletion, code generation, semantic search, and code explanation.

Unlike GitHub Copilot, that’s available on many IDEs, GhostWriter is only available on the Replit IDE.

Ghostwriter is an excellent alternative to Copilot if you use Replit often. Access to Ghostwriter is expensive compared to GitHub Copilot since you must pay for Replit’s Pro plan. Paying for Replit also gives you full access to Replit’s AI mode and other paid Replit features.

TabNine is an AI code assistant that helps you write code faster and better. It provides intelligent code completion, syntax highlighting, and error checking for various programming languages.

TabNine analyzes existing code to suggest words or phrases to predict later ones. It can also offer entire lines of code, functions, and classes. TabNine’s model learns from a massive open-source dataset to suggest code relevant to your project.

A strong advantage of TabNine is its free plan for personal projects. They also offer a paid pro plan with features like hosting and training your AI models.

TabNine is a great GitHub Copilot alternative since you can connect its AI models to your code repositories.

CodeGeex is an AI-powered code assistant that can help you write code faster.

Its model learns from a massive dataset of code. This allows it to generate accurate code suggestions and completions for many languages. It also supports a variety of code editors and IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, PyCharm, and IntelliJ IDEA.

CodeGeex is free for verified students, teachers, and open-source project maintainers. You can use CodeGeex to learn new languages, debug your code, and improve your code style to conform to industry practices.

CodeGeex is an excellent alternative to Copilot if you’re a student or hobbyist on a budget.

Captain Stack is a free, open-source VS Code extension that provides code suggestions to improve efficiency.

Captain Stack sends your search query to Google, StackOverflow, and Github Gist to auto-complete your code. The suggestions aren’t AI generated but based on real-world code by other developers, making them more likely to be accurate and useful.

Captain Stack supports many languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, C++, and C#. It also supports a variety of popular frameworks, such as React, Angular, and Vue.

Another advantage of Captain Stack over Copilot is that it is free and open-source. This means anyone can contribute to the project and help improve the suggestions.

Since Captain Stack is free, you can add it to your development arsenal while using Copilot.

Intellicode is an open-source extension for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code that provides code suggestions to improve efficiency.

IntelliCode uses machine learning to generate code suggestions tailored to the code’s current context.

Microsoft IntelliCode supports many languages and frameworks, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, C++, C#, C++/WinRT, Go, Kotlin, PHP, Ruby, Rust, Swift, Visual Basic, and Xamarin.

Unlike Copilot, IntelliCode is a free and open source across the supported editors. IntelliCode is more conservative in its suggestions, making it more likely to suggest well-tested code that follows best practices.

Choose Intellicode over Copilot if you need offline code suggestions or are working on a project requiring compliance with specific standards. You can configure IntelliCode to adhere to specific coding standards, unlike Copilot.

GitHub Copilot Is Cross Platform

One of the features contributing to GitHub Copilot’s popularity is its availability on multiple platforms, operating systems, and IDEs.

You can easily set up Copilot for VSCode by installing the GitHub Copilot extension, signing in to GitHub, configuring GitHub Copilot, and restarting VSCode.