Zed

Yes, Zed is free to download and use. The Free plan includes 50 Zed-hosted AI prompts per month and unlimited use of local models via Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible API with your own key. Zed Pro at $20/month gives you 500 prompts and $5 of monthly token credit. A two-week free trial of Pro is available and comes with $20 of token credits plus unlimited edit predictions.

Zed is built from scratch in Rust and runs on a custom GPU-accelerated UI engine, making it significantly faster than Electron-based editors like VS Code and its forks. Startup is near-instant, and even large files stay responsive. Zed also has real-time collaboration and an AI agent panel built in from day one rather than bolted on as extensions. The trade-off is a smaller extension ecosystem and fewer language features than VS Code.

Zed includes an AI agent panel with chat, inline edits, edit prediction (similar to Cursor's tab autocomplete), and multi-file editing. It supports Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, GPT-5.4, GPT-4o, o1, and local models via Ollama. You can also bring your own API key for any provider. The agent panel can read files, run terminal commands, and make edits across your codebase under your supervision.

Yes. Zed launched on macOS first in 2023, then Linux in 2024, and Windows in 2025 after extensive community testing. All three platforms get the same core feature set including the AI agent panel and edit prediction. Performance is best on macOS because that is where the team does most development, but Linux and Windows builds are now considered production-ready.

Zed Pro and Cursor Pro are priced identically at $20/month. Cursor gives you unlimited slow requests and 500 fast requests, while Zed gives you 500 prompts and $5 in token credit. For raw AI throughput, Cursor may be more generous, but Zed wins on editor performance, real-time collaboration, and Linux-first support. Try both in a 2-week trial and pick whichever feels faster to you.

Yes. Real-time collaboration is a first-class feature in Zed, allowing multiple developers to share a coding session, see each other's cursors and selections, and edit files together with conflict-free sync. This is especially useful for pair programming or remote code review sessions. Neither VS Code nor Cursor offer native collaboration of this quality — both rely on extensions like Live Share.

Yes. Zed supports Ollama out of the box, so you can run Qwen 2.5 Coder, DeepSeek Coder V2, Llama 3.3, or any other Ollama-compatible local model entirely on your machine. None of your code or prompts leave your computer. This is a strong selling point for privacy-sensitive work, and free Zed users can lean on local models to avoid ever needing the 50-prompt hosted allowance.

Edit prediction is Zed's version of Cursor's tab autocomplete — a next-edit suggestion that predicts what you'll type or change based on recent cursor movements and edits. On Pro and the free Student plan, edit predictions are unlimited and do not count against your prompt allowance. The feature uses a custom Zed-trained model optimized for low-latency suggestions and typically responds in under 100ms.