Zed

What it is

This section summarises Zed's own documentation. It is not a hands-on assessment.

Zed is a code editor from Zed Industries, the team behind Atom and Tree-sitter. It is written in Rust, runs natively on macOS, Linux and Windows, and its source is on GitHub under GPL-3.0-or-later, with some Apache-2.0 components. It is not a VS Code fork, so it has its own extension system rather than the VS Code marketplace.

• Agent Panel: prompt an agent, add context, review its changes and manage threads. Zed's own agent works with hosted models or your own provider API keys and supports MCP servers.
• External agents: run Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenCode and others inside Zed through the Agent Client Protocol. Zed does not charge for these; you pay the agent's provider.
• Edit predictions: Zed's open source Zeta model on Pro, Business and the Pro trial. On the free plan you can use GitHub Copilot, Codestral, Mercury Coder or a local model instead.
• Inline assistant to transform a selection in place, and real-time collaboration.

Pricing

Model	open source
Paid plans from	$10/month (Pro)
Notes	The editor is free and open source (GPL-3.0-or-later). Personal ($0): unlimited AI with your own API keys or external agents. Pro $10 a month: unlimited edit predictions and $5 of hosted tokens, then API list price +10%; 14-day free trial. Business $30 per seat a month.
Checked	October 29, 2026