GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is the most widely adopted AI coding assistant, built by GitHub (owned by Microsoft) and powered by models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, Moonshot AI and Microsoft, selected by the user. It operates as a plugin across VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, Xcode, Eclipse, Visual Studio, Raycast, Zed and SQL Server Management Studio, the broadest IDE coverage in the AI coding assistant category, and it also ships a CLI and a cloud agent. The combination of GitHub ecosystem depth and multi-IDE coverage is its core competitive advantage against AI-native editors such as Cursor, which ask developers to change editor. Copilot cloud agent creates pull requests from GitHub Issues, Copilot code review submits inline review comments, and both run on GitHub Actions and consume Actions minutes. Model Context Protocol support runs in both directions. Copilot acts as an MCP client on every paid plan, connecting external data sources and tools into context, with allow-list governance on Business and Enterprise. GitHub also publishes its own official MCP server, open source under the MIT license, offered both as a remote server hosted by GitHub and as a local build. Its documentation names VS Code, Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, JetBrains and Xcode as supported clients. Third-party coding agents including Claude Code and OpenAI Codex can be delegated tasks on Pro+ and Max. All prices are USD and the vendor publishes no annual rate, so every figure below is month to month, re-verified August 2026. Copilot Free is $0 and includes 2,000 completions per month with limited chat and agent usage. A Copilot Student plan is offered free to eligible students. Pro is $10 per user per month. Pro+ is $39 and Max is $100, each adding premium model access and a larger included allowance. Business is $19 per user per month and Enterprise is $39, and both are contact-sales only. Billing uses GitHub AI Credits expressed in dollars: the included allowance is a base amount plus a flex allotment that GitHub states may change over time, giving $15 total on Pro, $70 on Pro+ and $200 on Max. Code completions and next edit suggestions are unlimited on all paid plans and are not billed in credits. The $10 Pro tier does not buy pooled organization credits, access control, budget control, governance, audit logs or IP indemnity, all of which start at Business. Priority access to new models and roughly double the included usage of Business require Enterprise, which also requires GitHub Enterprise Cloud. Restricting users to models carrying FedRAMP Moderate certification is a separate capability available only on GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency. Expensive models consume credits far faster than standard ones, so heavy agent use can exhaust a monthly allowance before the cycle ends. Who GitHub Copilot is not for: developers wanting deep multi-file autonomous refactoring inside a purpose-built editor should evaluate Cursor (from $16/mo billed annually) or Claude Code (from $17/mo billed annually), both of which are built around repository-wide agentic work rather than around an editor plugin. Teams needing on-premise or offline operation cannot use Copilot, which requires internet access and GitHub authentication. Teams standardized on GitLab, Azure DevOps or Bitbucket will find the GitHub-centric ecosystem a meaningful gap. JetBrains-only teams wanting a fully native experience without a plugin layer may prefer JetBrains AI Assistant (from $8.33/mo billed annually). Current state Q3 2026: GitHub expresses AI Credit allowances in dollar values rather than numeric counts. The published model catalog spans Anthropic Claude (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus and Fable), OpenAI GPT-5 series, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Moonshot Kimi and Microsoft MAI, plus Raptor mini, and it changes frequently enough that any fixed list dates quickly. Third-party agent delegation to Claude Code and OpenAI Codex is in public preview on Pro+ and Max. Security, verified on the GitHub Copilot Trust Center, which is scoped to Copilot rather than to GitHub Enterprise Cloud: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO/IEC 42001:2023, the last certified in March 2026. SOC 1, SOC 3, CSA STAR Level 2, TISAX and PCI DSS are also published there but sit outside this directory's approved certification list. GitHub Copilot itself holds no FedRAMP authorization, re-verified August 2026.