How does Zed compare with the alternatives?
Cursor builds its own agents, Tab completion, and cloud agents into an editor based on the VS Code codebase. Zed is a native editor that runs its own agent and hosts Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor's agent through ACP. Choose by whether engineers need Cursor's completion or one editor for many agents.
GitHub Copilot adds chat, agents, and completion to VS Code and other IDEs on a GitHub seat. Zed replaces the editor and can use a Copilot subscription for its agent models and edit predictions. The decision is whether engineers stay in VS Code or move to a native editor.
Devin Desktop, formerly Windsurf, is Cognition's agent editor and hands longer work to Devin cloud agents. Zed keeps agents in a native editor and lets engineers bring their own agent and model provider.
Junie is JetBrains' coding agent inside IntelliJ-based IDEs, which keep deep refactoring and language tooling. Zed trades some of that depth for a lighter native editor that hosts several agents. Teams invested in JetBrains IDEs should weigh the refactoring they would give up.
