StarCoder vs GitHub Copilot vs Windsurf vs Amazon Q Developer
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
StarCoder
Open-source code LLM, 80+ languages, OpenRAIL commercial-use license
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GitHub Copilot
The most widely adopted AI pair programmer, native to GitHub
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Windsurf
Agentic AI IDE — rebranded Devin Desktop by Cognition, June 2026
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Amazon Q Developer
AWS's sunsetting AI coding assistant — Kiro is the successor
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| RECATOOLS Score | 6 / 10 | 8.3 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 | 6.5 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | Fully free | Free plan open to all GitHub users (not just students/OSS maintainers) | — | Free — unlimited completions + 50 agent chat interactions/month |
| Paid from | — | Pro $10/mo, Pro+ $39/mo, Max $100/mo, Business $19/user/mo, Enterprise $39/user/mo | Free; Pro $20/month; Max $200/month; Teams $80/month + $40/seat/month | Pro $19/user/month (unlimited agent interactions, IP indemnification) |
| Has API | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Users | 100k+ researchers and developers | 4.7m+ paid subscribers | Not reliably disclosed | — |
| Founded | — | — | 2021 | 2024 |
| Maker | Hugging Face / ServiceNow | Microsoft | Varun Mohan, Douglas Chen | Amazon |
| Verdict | StarCoder, from the BigCode project (Hugging Face and ServiceNow), is an openly licensed code-generation model family — now on its second generation, StarCoder2, in 3B/7B/15B sizes trained on The Stack v2's 600+ language... |
For teams already on GitHub, Copilot remains the lowest-friction AI coding assistant: inline completions, chat, multi-file edits and an agent mode, native in VS Code, JetBrains and GitHub itself, with a choice of GPT, Cl... |
Windsurf is now Devin Desktop: Cognition acquired the Codeium-built IDE in July 2025 and folded it into the Devin brand on June 2, 2026. The product itself remains a strong agentic editor — VS Code-derived, with the Rust... |
Amazon Q Developer is on the clock: AWS closed new signups on May 15, 2026 and ends support for the IDE plugins and paid subscriptions on April 30, 2027, steering everyone toward Kiro, its spec-driven successor. Until th... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.