Coding · Head-to-head

Zed vs North Mini Code

Zed (freemium, AI Score 8.4/10) vs North Mini Code (free, AI Score 7.8/10). 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 7.8)
→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.

Try Zed →

Pick North Mini Code if…

→budget is the constraint
→your primary use case is teams self-hosting a coding agent on their own gpus who need permissive licensing and low memory footprint more than they need frontier-level scores or a million-token window.

Try North Mini Code →

Spec	Zed	North Mini Code
Category	Coding	Coding
Pricing model	freemium	free
Headline pricing	Free open-source editor; hosted AI paid tier — check site for current rates	Free open weights (Apache 2.0) — you pay only your own compute
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.	The weights are unconditionally free under Apache 2.0; your only cost is the compute you run them on. Any hosted-endpoint pricing is set by whoever hosts it, not by the license.
AI Score	8.4/10	7.8/10
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.	Teams self-hosting a coding agent on their own GPUs who need permissive licensing and low memory footprint more than they need frontier-level scores or a million-token window.
Editor's pick	—	—
Use cases	development agents	development agents
Date added	2026-05-02	2026-06-15

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 · free

✓Apache 2.0 with no usage restrictions — commercial use, private forks, and immunity from a vendor repricing or retiring the version you run
✓~3B active parameters means it fits on a single consumer GPU while answering usefully on multi-step repo tasks, a combination still rare
✓Interleaved thinking with native JSON-schema tool calling is purpose-built for agentic loops rather than bolted on afterwards
✓Quantized variants plus vLLM/SGLang/Ollama/Docker support make the local-deployment path genuinely short

×256K context is now the short end of the open-weights coding tier — GLM-5.2 and MiniMax M3 both ship 1M-token windows
×Near-identical competition: Poolside's Laguna XS.2 is also Apache 2.0, also ~33B/3B MoE, and claims a higher SWE-Bench Verified score from an earlier release
×Benchmark figures (67.6% Verified, 40.2% Pro) are Cohere's own launch claims and have not been independently re-verified here
×Code specialist only, and MoE serving needs vLLM or SGLang — an addition to your stack rather than a replacement, with no confirmed first-party managed hosting

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