Coding · Head-to-head

Zed vs Bolt.new

Zed (freemium, AI Score 8.4/10) vs Bolt.new (freemium, AI Score 8/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.

The verdict

Pick Zed if…

→overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 8.4 vs 8)
→your primary use case is developers on macos or linux who want a fast, fully open-source editor and would rather plug in claude code or their own api keys than accept a bundled ai subscription.
→you need: agents

Try Zed →

Pick Bolt.new if…

→your primary use case is founders and product engineers who want a full-stack prototype — ui, api routes, postgres and auth — running and deployed in an afternoon without configuring a local environment.
→you need: productivity

Try Bolt.new →

Spec	Zed	Bolt.new
Category	Coding	Coding
Pricing model	freemium	freemium
Headline pricing	Free open-source editor; hosted AI paid tier — check site for current rates	Free tier + token-metered paid plans — check website for current pricing
Free tier	The editor itself is free and open source under GPL-3.0 with nothing held back for paying users. Hosted AI carries a free monthly allowance; past it you either subscribe or supply your own API keys.	Yes — a recurring daily token allowance, enough to build and preview small apps but exhausted quickly on anything iterative
AI Score	8.4/10	8/10
Best for	Developers on macOS or Linux who want a fast, fully open-source editor and would rather plug in Claude Code or their own API keys than accept a bundled AI subscription.	Founders and product engineers who want a full-stack prototype — UI, API routes, Postgres and auth — running and deployed in an afternoon without configuring a local environment.
Editor's pick	—	—
Use cases	development agents	development productivity
Date added	2026-05-02	2026-04-30

Coding · freemium

✓Fastest mainstream editor — GPU-rendered UI keeps input latency and large-file scrolling ahead of every Electron-based competitor
✓ACP lets you run Claude Code or Gemini CLI inside the editor with proper diff review instead of in a separate terminal
✓Genuinely open source end to end, including Zeta, the edit-prediction model behind its completions
✓Debugger, git panel, terminal and real-time collaboration are built in, so there is no extension stack to assemble
✓Model choice is yours — hosted plan, your own API keys, or fully local through Ollama and LM Studio

×Extension catalogue is a fraction of the VS Code marketplace that Cursor and Windsurf inherit for free
×Zed's own agent is competent but no longer distinctive next to Cursor or dedicated terminal agents — a lot of the value depends on which external agent you plug in
×Windows support trails macOS and Linux in maturity
×Hosted AI billing has been reworked more than once, which makes cost planning harder than on a flat-rate competitor

Coding · freemium

✓Genuinely zero setup — a full Node dev environment, package installs and dev server all run in the browser tab
✓Generates a deployable full-stack app with API routes, Postgres and auth rather than UI-only scaffolding
✓Source code stays editable in place and exports to GitHub, so projects can graduate to a normal workflow
✓One-click Netlify deploy with custom domain support takes prompt to live URL without leaving the tool
✓Open-source codebase means a self-hostable community fork (bolt.diy) exists for teams that need it

×Token-metered billing makes cost unpredictable — retries and failed generations draw down the same allowance as successful ones
×Runtime is bound to the JavaScript/Node ecosystem plus Expo; no Python, Go or JVM backends
×Non-trivial business logic, security review and data modelling still require an experienced developer to finish
×Crowded field in 2026 — Lovable, v0 and Replit Agent overlap heavily, and Bolt's advantage over them has narrowed to the in-browser runtime and code portability

Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.