Coding · Head-to-head
Aider vs Cody
Aider (free, AI Score 8/10) vs Cody (paid, AI Score 6.4/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.
The verdict
Pick Aider if…
- →you need a genuinely free option
- →budget is the constraint
- →overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 8 vs 6.4)
- →your primary use case is terminal-centric developers who already hold their own api keys and want an ai editor that commits its own changes to git, especially anyone routing work to cheap open-weight or local models to keep cost and code under their own control.
Pick Cody if…
- →your primary use case is platform and developer-experience teams at large organisations already running sourcegraph, who need repo-wide ai answers under their own permission model and cloud-hosted inference.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Aider | Cody |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Coding | Coding |
| Pricing model | free | paid |
| Headline pricing | Free (BYOK — pay your LLM provider) | Enterprise only — check website for current pricing |
| Free tier | The tool itself is entirely free and open-source. The only spend is LLM API usage from whichever provider you point it at, and that drops to zero if you run models locally. | — |
| AI Score | 8/10 | 6.4/10 |
| Best for | Terminal-centric developers who already hold their own API keys and want an AI editor that commits its own changes to git, especially anyone routing work to cheap open-weight or local models to keep cost and code under their own control. | Platform and developer-experience teams at large organisations already running Sourcegraph, who need repo-wide AI answers under their own permission model and cloud-hosted inference. |
| Editor's pick | — | — |
| Use cases | development | development |
| Date added | 2026-04-30 | 2026-05-01 |
Pros and cons
⌨️
Aider
Coding · free
Pros
- ✓Free and Apache-2.0, with per-request token cost printed in the terminal so spend is visible rather than hidden behind a plan quota
- ✓Every AI edit is its own git commit, making review, blame and rollback plain git operations
- ✓Provider-agnostic via LiteLLM: frontier models, cheap open-weight models and fully local Ollama models all work the same way
- ✓Architect mode routes planning and code-writing to two different models, which cuts cost without giving up reasoning quality
- ✓Publishes its own polyglot code-editing benchmark and public leaderboard, so its accuracy claims are independently checkable
Cons
- ×Human-in-the-loop by design: it does not run the long autonomous tool-use loops that Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Goose now offer, so unattended multi-step work is not its shape
- ×Extension story is thin next to MCP-native agents; check the current docs before assuming a given external tool integration exists
- ×Development is effectively one maintainer, a real risk for a tool whose value depends on tracking new model releases quickly
- ×Terminal-first and conversation-driven, with no inline completion; the add-files-to-context workflow takes real learning for developers used to an IDE assistant
Cody
Coding · paid
Pros
- ✓Context comes from a real code-search index rather than a bolted-on vector store, so cross-repository answers cite actual definitions and references
- ✓Model routing through Amazon Bedrock or Azure OpenAI keeps inference inside your own cloud account — a hard requirement in regulated environments
- ✓Inherits Sourcegraph repository permissions, so it cannot surface code a user isn't cleared to see
- ✓Self-hosted and air-gapped deployment options that most AI coding assistants simply do not offer
- ✓Adds AI on top of an installation many large engineering orgs already run, rather than introducing a new vendor
Cons
- ×The self-serve Free and Pro tiers were retired in 2025 — individual developers can no longer buy this, which is a major change from earlier reviews
- ×Sourcegraph's agentic coding investment moved to Amp, so Cody no longer receives the company's headline feature work
- ×No autonomous multi-file agent loop comparable to Cursor, Claude Code, or Sourcegraph's own Amp
- ×Requires a Sourcegraph deployment and index before it delivers its one differentiator — a heavy prerequisite if you aren't already a customer
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.