Eight open-source alternatives to Cursor, compared

Why teams look past Cursor

The usual reasons are dull and well-founded. Code and prompts leave for a third party. Pricing changes land as fait accompli. A closed codebase means a bug you can reproduce but not read, and a feature you need but cannot add. For teams under contract — anything with a compliance officer attached — the last one alone settles it.

Open source fixes those. It does not fix the others. You take on operational weight: someone has to run the thing, and model costs move from "someone else's problem" to "your invoice" (expect roughly $5–30 per developer per month depending on which model and how hard you push it). The good news is that every project here will take a local model, so you can start at zero and only pay when remote models earn their keep.

Side-by-side comparison

Repository figures below are from the GitHub API on 22 October 2026.

The maintenance check nobody does

Star counts are the first thing people compare and the least useful. Aider sits fourth in this list on stars and fifth on activity — nothing has merged since May 2026. Roo Code last moved in May; Void in June; Tabby at the end of June. Four of eight projects are effectively idle.

That matters more here than in most software. These tools sit between your editor and a model whose API changes without warning. When a provider deprecated a context-window parameter or ships a new tool-calling format, an unmaintained extension does not fail loudly — it quietly gets worse. You will read it as the model being flaky.

The flip side is that a stalled project is not automatically a dead one; some maintainers work in long private stretches. But if you are choosing today, absence of commits for a quarter is a real signal, and it is doing work that a five-digit star count cannot.

The best picks

Cline — best for most people staying in VS Code

An autonomous coding agent that runs inside VS Code and shows its plan and each file edit before applying anything. That human-in-the-loop design is its real value: the agent moves fast, but you see what changed and can reject it. Apache-2.0, actively developed — commits the same day we checked.

The trade-off is that "autonomous" cuts both ways. It will happily touch files across your tree, so it rewards a developer who reads diffs. Around 1,700 open issues suggests plenty of surface area. It is also tied to VS Code — no JetBrains.

OpenHands — best for unattended agent work

Formerly OpenDevin, this is the most permissively licensed project here (MIT) and the most ambitious: give it a ticket, let it work a branch and open a pull request. Its Python-isolated execution environment is the piece competitors often bolt on and rarely do well.

Setup is heavier than installing an extension — expect Docker and a config file — and it is built for delegating work rather than pairing inside your editor. Teams who want several tasks progressing in parallel get the most from it.

Zed — best for raw editing performance

Written in Rust by a team with Atom and Tree-sitter in its history, Zed is the fastest editor here by a comfortable margin, with multiplayer editing that actually works. Still very actively developed.

Two caveats. GitHub reports the licence as NOASSERTION, meaning the repository mixes terms rather than declaring one standard licence — worth reading yourself before building anything commercial on it. And its agent is younger than Cline's; you get speed first, maturity second.

Continue — best for customising and going local

Continue spans VS Code and JetBrains and is built around assembling your own assistant: mix models, write rules, share configurations. Its local tab-autocomplete runs through Ollama or similar, so keystrokes need never leave the machine.

Licence is clean (Apache-2.0) and it is under active development. Out of the box it does less than Cline — you configure rather than just install.

Tabby — best for self-hosting completion in a team

Tabby is the closest open replacement for GitHub Copilot's inline completions, running on your own hardware with a container deploy. Small footprint, modest 343 open issues.

It is narrow on purpose: completion more than conversation. Note the same NOASSERTION licensing caveat as Zed, and no commits since June 2026.

Void — closest thing to Cursor itself

A fork of VS Code with Cursor's interaction model — ctrl+K to edit inline, ctrl+L to chat — so anyone leaving Cursor knows exactly where they are. Its pitch is that your data stays put.

This is the recommendation we would most like to make and cannot, because it has not been committed to since June 2026. Try it; do not build a team workflow on it yet.

Aider — best terminal pair programmer, with a caveat

Aider's reputation rests on its repository map: it builds a dependency-aware picture of a large codebase rather than stuffing everything into a prompt, which is why it stayed useful on big projects. Its habit of auto-committing each step makes mistakes cheap to undo.

Python-based and terminal-only — excellent there, absent elsewhere. And nothing has shipped since May 2026.

Roo Code — multiple agents, currently stalled

Roo Code orchestrates several specialised agents in one workflow, which is attractive in principle. In practice, no commits since May 2026 puts it behind actively maintained alternatives for the same job.

Pick by scenario

The licence line worth reading

Six of the eight declare MIT or Apache-2.0, both straightforward for commercial use — MIT being the more permissive of the pair, Apache-2.0 adding an explicit patent grant. The other two, Zed and Tabby, show NOASSERTION on GitHub, which is not a licence but GitHub saying it cannot identify one. Usually that means multiple terms apply across components. Neither project is unusable, but if this is going into a product someone else sells, read the actual files before shipping.