Zed
Zed is an open source code editor by Zed Industries, written in Rust, with a built-in AI agent, edit predictions, external agents over ACP and real-time collaboration.
What Zed does
Zed is a native code editor written in Rust for macOS, Windows and Linux, built by the team behind Atom and Tree-sitter. It includes an agent panel for AI edits, edit predictions as you type, a native debugger, git integration, remote development over SSH, and real-time collaboration with shared editing, channels and voice.
Zed lets you choose where the AI comes from. You can use Zed's hosted models, your own API keys, existing ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot subscriptions, gateways such as OpenRouter or Bedrock, or local models through Ollama, LM Studio or llama.cpp. Over the Agent Client Protocol, external agents such as Claude, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI and Cursor run inside Zed's agent panel.
Zed works without AI or a subscription. The free Personal plan includes an allowance of accepted edit predictions and unlimited use of your own keys or external agents, while Pro adds unlimited predictions and an allowance of hosted tokens, billed by usage beyond that.
Who Zed is for
- Developers who want a fast native editor and the freedom to plug in any agent or model
- People who already pay for Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot and want to use that inside their editor
- Pair programming with real-time shared editing and voice
- Running local models through Ollama or LM Studio
Who should pick something else
- Teams that need SSO, SAML or SCIM today: Zed lists them as planned but not available
- People who rely on VS Code extensions; Zed has its own extension system
- Anyone who wants Zed in the browser: the web version is not yet available
Zed: one strength, one limit
Strength. Zed is open source (GPL-3.0-or-later, 91,154 GitHub stars on 2026-10-01) and its free plan allows unlimited AI use with your own keys or external agents such as Claude, Codex and Gemini CLI.
Limit. Zed's Business plan lacks SSO, SAML and SCIM, which Zed lists as planned but not available, and the Pro plan includes only a small allowance of hosted tokens a month.
What Zed costs
Free Personal plan with limited edit predictions and unlimited use of your own keys or external agents; Pro and Business add hosted model usage and team controls.
Current prices: zed.dev . We do not list prices: vendors change them often, so check the maker's own page before you buy.
Zed with agent skills and MCP servers
Skills. Zed supports Agent Skills natively since v1.4.2 (2026-05-27). It reads global skills from ~/.agents/skills and project skills from .agents/skills in the worktree (trusted worktrees only); skills must sit directly in the skills folder. Call one with a / command or @skill, or manage them in Settings, AI, Skills. The open skills CLI installs Zed skills into the same .agents/skills folder.
MCP. Zed adds MCP servers in Settings, AI, MCP Servers, then Add Server (local, remote, or from an extension), or in settings.json under context_servers: command, args and env for a local server, or url and headers for a remote one; remote servers can use OAuth. Zed supports MCP tools and prompts.
Browse agent skills and MCP servers that work with Zed.
Alternatives to Zed
- Cursor: Cursor is an AI code editor by Anysphere that pairs a desktop editor with an agent, a CLI and cloud agents, using models from several vendors plus its own Composer models.
- Windsurf (now Devin Desktop): Windsurf is an AI code editor by Cognition, renamed Devin Desktop on 2026-06-02, that pairs a desktop editor and Tab completions with a local agent and handoff to Devin's cloud agents.
- Google Antigravity: Google Antigravity is an agentic development platform by Google that runs coding agents in a desktop command center, a standalone IDE, a CLI called agy and extensions for other editors.
- GitHub Copilot: GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant by GitHub that works in VS Code, JetBrains and other editors, in a CLI, and as a cloud agent that opens pull requests on GitHub.