The AI coding tools in the AI Download Center catalog fall into four groups: assistants in your editor (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Cline), agents you run in the terminal (Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex CLI, Aider), autonomous agents you host yourself (OpenHands), and the models behind them. Six of the nine assistants and agents are open source, GitHub Copilot and Cursor have free plans, and every entry links straight to its official site or repository.
This list isn't ranked, and we haven't benchmarked these tools. It groups them by where they fit in your workflow, so you can pick a tool first and then choose a model to run behind it.
| Tool | Where you use it | Price type | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | IDE extension | Freemium | AI help in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Vim or Neovim |
| Cursor | Desktop code editor | Freemium | An AI-first code editor with built-in agents |
| Cline | IDE extension and CLI | Open source | An open-source agent inside VS Code or JetBrains |
| Claude Code | CLI, IDEs, web | Paid | Anthropic's coding agent, if you already pay for Claude |
| Gemini CLI | CLI | Open source | A terminal agent with a free tier through a Google account |
| Codex CLI | CLI | Open source | OpenAI's agent, running locally in your terminal |
| Aider | CLI | Open source | Git-based code changes across a repository |
| OpenHands | Self-hosted app | Open source | Handing off whole tasks to an autonomous agent |
| Continue | IDE extension | Open source | No longer maintained (see the note below) |
| Claude | Web app | Freemium | Talking through code in a long-context chat |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | Web API | Paid | A hosted model for agentic coding |
| GPT-5.5 | Web API | Paid | A hosted model for coding and agents |
| Qwen3 | Open model | Open source | An open, multilingual model family for coding and agents |
| DeepSeek Coder | Open model | Open source | A code-specialized open model |
| Code Llama | Open model | Open source | A code-fine-tuned open model family |
What it's for: An AI pair programmer for VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Vim and Neovim.
Who it suits: Developers who want AI help inside the editor they already use, including people outside VS Code.
Price type: Freemium. The catalog notes a free plan, and GitHub's page describes "GitHub Copilot Free" with limited functionality and "No credit card required."
What it's for: An AI-powered code editor with built-in coding agents.
Who it suits: Developers who are happy to switch to a new editor built around AI, rather than adding an extension to their current one.
Price type: Freemium, with a free Hobby plan. Cursor's pricing page lists it as "No credit card required" with "Limited Agent requests."
What it's for: An open-source autonomous coding agent for VS Code and JetBrains, also available as a CLI.
Who it suits: Developers who want an agent that works through tasks in their editor, from open-source code they can inspect. Cline's site describes it as "Apache 2.0 open source" and lists JetBrains support as Early Access.
What it's for: An open-source coding assistant for VS Code and JetBrains.
Status: No longer maintained after joining Cursor. The final 2.0.0 release stays available under Apache 2.0, and the GitHub repository is now read-only.
Who it suits: People already using it, or anyone who wants to fork or study the code. If you're starting fresh, look at the maintained tools above.
What it's for: Anthropic's coding agent for the terminal, IDEs and web.
Who it suits: Developers who already have a paid Claude plan, or who want to pay per use through API credits.
Price type: Paid. It's included with paid Claude plans or can be used with API credits.
What it's for: Google's open-source AI agent that brings Gemini into your terminal.
Who it suits: Developers who want to try a terminal agent without paying. Sign in with a Google account to use the free tier. The GitHub README lists the free tier as "60 requests/min and 1,000 requests/day" for personal Google accounts.
What it's for: OpenAI's open-source coding agent that runs locally in your terminal.
Who it suits: Developers who want OpenAI's coding agent working on files on their own machine.
What it's for: A terminal-based AI coding assistant for local workflows and code changes across repositories.
Who it suits: Developers who work with git. Aider's site says it "automatically commits changes with sensible commit messages" and can "connect to almost any LLM, including local models."
What it's for: An open-source coding agent for autonomous task execution and local development automation.
Who it suits: Developers and teams who want to hand off whole tasks and run the agent on their own infrastructure. The README calls it a "self-hosted developer control center for coding agents and automations," with a Docker sandbox option, and says you can "use with any LLM."
Price type: Open source (MIT license, per the GitHub repository)
If you just want to paste in code and talk it through, the catalog also tags Claude (Anthropic, Freemium) for coding. It's a long-context AI assistant for writing, coding, planning and careful reasoning. Unlike the tools above, it works in a chat window and doesn't edit your files directly.
Several of these tools, including Aider, OpenHands and Cline, let you choose the model. The catalog tags these models for coding.
To run an open model on your own machine, see our guide to local LLM apps. Which models a tool supports, and what hardware a model needs, depends on both. Check each official page before you set anything up.
Every tool on this page comes from the hand-picked part of the AI Download Center catalog: tools we add and check one by one, not a test lab. We included all 15 hand-picked entries tagged or categorized for coding, and we haven't benchmarked or ranked them. The catalog also includes community model cards imported automatically from Hugging Face; those aren't covered by this guide and link to Hugging Face rather than to an official site. Descriptions, price types and links come from our catalog entries. Where we mention a detail that isn't in the catalog, we checked it on the tool's official page on 2026-09-30. No listing on this page is sponsored, and none of the companies named here are partners of AI Download Center.
Browse the coding tools, plus community coding models from Hugging Face, in the free AI Download Center directory.