Open-source JetBrains AI Assistant alternatives

Cline is an open-source coding agent that works in your IDE, terminal and desktop. It can edit code across a project, create files, run commands and browse the web, with human-in-the-loop approval for tools in the editor. It is written in TypeScript and released under the Apache-2.0 license.

The same agent engine is offered in several forms: a CLI with an interactive mode and a headless mode for CI/CD and scripting, a native desktop app for macOS and Windows that works from any folder, schedules recurring routines and manages models, plugins and MCP servers, a VS Code extension, a JetBrains plugin for IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, GoLand and others, and an SDK.

The SDK is a Node.js programmatic API for building custom agents with custom tools, multi-agent teams, connectors and scheduled automations. The README notes that the JetBrains plugin is not open-sourced. Cline suits developers who want one coding agent across their editor, terminal and automation pipelines.

Continue is an open-source coding agent that was offered as a command-line tool, a VS Code extension and a JetBrains plugin. It is written in TypeScript and released under the Apache-2.0 license. According to the README, the project's GitHub repository has stopped receiving active maintenance and is now read-only, so new features and fixes should not be expected from it.

The team shipped a final 2.0.0 release for the VS Code extension, the CLI and the JetBrains plugin. That release removed anonymous telemetry and authentication, and fixed a batch of bugs. The maintainers recommend the CLI over the JetBrains plugin, and they point to the documentation for configuration and customization. The project describes the codebase as a foundation that others can build on, which makes it relevant as reference code more than as an actively developed product.

Kilo Code is an AI coding agent that you can use in VS Code, in JetBrains IDEs or from the CLI. It is open source under the MIT license and written in TypeScript. According to the README, you can pick from more than 500 models and switch between them in the middle of a task, and you pay the model provider's rate with no markup. No API keys are needed to start.

Besides the local extensions, a Cloud Agent runs Kilo from the web without a local machine, and automated AI code reviews can be set up for pull requests. The CLI is started with the kilo command in a project directory and can be installed from release binaries for Windows, macOS on Apple Silicon and Intel, and Linux on x64 and ARM, with variants for older CPUs and Alpine-style images. The repository started in 2025 and its README is translated into many languages.

Aider is AI pair programming in your terminal. It lets you work with large language models to start a new project or build on an existing codebase, asking for changes in plain language and letting the model edit the files in your repository.

It builds a map of the whole codebase to help in larger projects, supports more than 100 programming languages and commits changes to git with descriptive messages, so you can diff or undo AI edits with familiar tools. It can connect to cloud models and local models, accept images and web pages as context, take voice instructions, and run linters and tests after each change, attempting to fix problems they report. It can also be used from an IDE through code comments, or via copy and paste with a model's web chat.

Aider is written in Python and licensed under Apache-2.0. The README names a handful of commercial models it has been used with most, but says it can connect to almost any model, and installation and usage guides are available in the documentation.

Tabby is an AI coding assistant that you host yourself, positioned as an on-premises, open-source alternative to GitHub Copilot. It is self-contained, so it needs no separate database management system or cloud service, and it exposes an OpenAPI interface that makes it easy to connect to existing infrastructure such as cloud IDEs.

It is designed to run on consumer-grade GPUs. Beyond code suggestions, the project has added a chat side panel, an Answer Engine whose conversations can be saved as shareable pages, the ability to switch between backend chat models, and the option to index repositories, your own documentation and GitLab merge requests as context. LDAP authentication and a VS Code extension with @-mentions for files are also covered in its updates.

Tabby is written in Rust and deployed on your own servers, which keeps source code and prompts inside your network. That suits organizations that cannot send code to a hosted service, and the docs, roadmap and a Slack community are linked from the repository.