Claude Code vs Zed
Read from each vendor’s own pages last night, so it does not go stale the way a written comparison does.
CLI agent
Claude Code
Anthropic's terminal coding agent. The highest-adoption CLI agent by developer survey share.
Free, then $20 / mo
IDE
Zed
Rust-native editor with an agent panel. Free to use, open source, paid hosted inference.
Free, then $10 / mo
Measured — counted from real repositories, nightlyAsserted — read from the vendor docs, dated
| Compared on | Claude Code | Zed |
|---|---|---|
| Asserted — what each vendor publishes about itself | ||
| Category | CLI agent | IDE |
| Vendor | Anthropic | Zed Industries |
| Status | Active | Active |
| How it charges | Subscription | Hybrid |
| Entry price | Free, then $20 / mo | Free, then $10 / mo |
| Plans |
|
|
| Default model | anthropic/claude-opus-4.8 | None — you choose |
| Your own key | Yes | Yes |
| Source | Proprietary | Open source · GPL-3.0 |
| Measured — counted on the last nightly run | ||
| Stars | 140.1K | 87.9K |
| Maintenance | 92/100 | 94/100 |
| Days since last push | 9 | 0 |
| Top model in it | Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.8 · $10.00 | not measured |
| Its volume | 747B tokens | not measured |
What has changed on either of them
2 entries| What changed | Kind | Was, and is now | Confidence | Occurred |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zed changed the quota wording on its pricing pageZed | Quota change | limits 5 tokenlimits 5 token, unlimited accepted edit predictions, unlimited edit predictions, unlimited edit predictions role-based, unlimited use with your api keys or | low | |
| Claude Code changed the quota wording on its pricing pageClaude Code | Quota change | limits 24 hourslimits 20x more usage, 20x the usage, 24 hours, 5x more usage, unlimited projects to organize chats | low |
