Zed AI

Zed is the high-performance code editor purpose-built for speed and real-time multiplayer collaboration, with native AI capabilities including AI chat, edit predictions, external agent integration via ACP (Agent Context Protocol), and MCP support. Founded in 2021 by Nathan Sobo (creator of Atom and contributor to Electron), Zed has grown into a defining brand for developers who prioritize editor performance, with 87,000+ GitHub stars and strong adoption in Rust, Go, and modern systems development communities where Zed's GPU-accelerated rendering produces materially smoother editing experiences than VS Code. Pricing is tiered across three plans. Personal at $0 forever covers the full code editor with 2,000 accepted edit predictions per month, unlimited multiplayer collaboration, weekly releases, and unlimited use with your own API keys or external agents including Claude Agent, Codex CLI, and others. Pro at $10/month adds unlimited edit predictions, $5 of tokens included per month for Zed-hosted AI features, and usage-based billing beyond $5 at API list price plus 10%. Business at $30/seat/month adds org-wide AI model policies, data governance controls, unified spend visibility, role-based access controls, and unlimited edit predictions. Order form contracts are available at 25+ seats. Month-to-month plans are available for all tiers. SSO, SAML, and SCIM are planned but not currently available on Business. Zed differentiates from VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf through GPU-accelerated rendering and multiplayer collaboration architecture: Zed renders at 120fps even on large files, with code intelligence that feels materially faster than VS Code-based editors. The multiplayer collaboration (similar to Google Docs for code) lets multiple developers edit the same file simultaneously, addressing pair-programming use cases that other editors handle through screen-sharing or async PRs. Zed's privacy posture is strong: code and prompts are discarded after each request and never used to train AI models. Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI all have contractual zero-retention agreements with Zed. Edit Prediction training is opt-in only and disabled by default. The editor is fully open-source on GitHub under zed-industries/zed. Teams that need the deepest autonomous agent capabilities should also evaluate Cursor ($16/mo billed annually) or Claude Code ($17/mo billed annually) alongside Zed. Zed's extension ecosystem is smaller than VS Code Marketplace's 50,000+ extensions. Current state Q3 2026: Zed reached its 1.0 release in April 2026 and launched Zed for Business the following month, adding the org-level admin tier. Recent work has centered on agentic development, including Parallel Agents for running multiple AI agents at once and Agent Metrics for visibility into agent activity. The Zeta 2.1 edit-prediction model shipped in May 2026, cutting token use roughly threefold while lowering latency. Zed remains fully open source at 87,000+ GitHub stars with weekly releases, though SSO, SAML, and SCIM are still planned rather than available on Business.