StarCoder
Open-source code LLM, 80+ languages, OpenRAIL commercial-use license
Overview
StarCoder, from Hugging Face and ServiceNow's BigCode project, is an open code LLM (now StarCoder2, 3B-15B) trained on permissively licensed source under the OpenRAIL-M license, which allows commercial use but bans malicious-code generation.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
Use cases
ASEAN Perspective
StarCoder in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
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+ languages. The OpenRAIL-M license permits commercial use with narrow restrictions (no malware, no medical-advice apps), which matters to enterprises wary of copyright exposure in training data.
On raw benchmarks it holds up well for its size — StarCoder2-15B matches or beats CodeLlama-34B, a model twice as large — but it still trails the strongest open coders, Qwen2.5-Coder and DeepSeek-Coder, on head-to-head scores, and trails frontier proprietary models entirely. It's more compelling for license clarity and self-hostability than for topping leaderboards. Open weights mean unrestricted ASEAN use, but you supply the infrastructure.
What people say
There's no G2 or Trustpilot page for StarCoder — it's a model you download and run, not a SaaS product people leave star ratings on. The signal instead comes from benchmarks and from what teams building on it say, and both tell a consistent story: solid, not spectacular.
StarCoder2-15B matches or beats CodeLlama-34B, a model more than double its size, and the 3B version holds its own against similarly sized competitors. That's a real achievement for a model trained entirely on permissively licensed code. But stack it against 2026's actual leaders — Qwen2.5-Coder and DeepSeek-Coder-V2 — and StarCoder2 comes in behind on most head-to-head benchmarks, sometimes by a wide margin.
What keeps StarCoder relevant isn't raw capability, it's data governance. The Stack v2 dataset was built specifically to dodge GPL contamination and copyright risk, and the OpenRAIL-M license spells out exactly what you can and can't do commercially — a level of clarity enterprises doing legal review actually want, even if it costs a few benchmark points. NVIDIA ships it inside NIM containers for exactly that reason: teams that need a defensible, self-hostable coding model, not necessarily the best one.
For self-hosted or fine-tuned deployments where license risk matters more than leaderboard position, StarCoder2 still earns its place. For raw coding ability alone, most teams in 2026 are reaching for something else first.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- StarCoder was trained on The Stack dataset, which was filtered using an opt-out mechanism — developers could request their GitHub repositories be excluded from training.
- The 15B parameter model achieves performance comparable to closed 30B code models, demonstrating that careful data curation matters more than raw scale.
- BigCode is a unique collaboration between two companies (Hugging Face and ServiceNow) and the broader academic community, releasing all training data and model weights openly.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including StarCoder's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with StarCoder unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
For the latest details, please refer to StarCoder directly →
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