Zed vs VS Code vs JetBrains Air: 2026 Comparison

Three code editors are pulling developer attention in different directions this October. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code still anchors most teams, Zed editor has climbed to roughly 8,100 monthly US searches as Rust-curious developers go looking for something faster, and JetBrains has folded its Fleet project into a new agentic tool called Air. The result is a genuine three-way comparison rather than another rehash of VS Code versus a Copilot extension.

This piece lines up Zed editor, VS Code, and JetBrains Air on specs, pricing, AI features, and real adoption data pulled from named surveys rather than guesswork. By the end you will know which editor fits a Rust shop, which one fits a .NET team still loyal to Rider, and why nobody has yet published a clean head-to-head speed benchmark for all three.

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Why Developers Are Suddenly Comparing Zed, VS Code, and JetBrains Air

For most of the last five years, the code editor conversation was simple: VS Code won, and the only open question was which AI extension to bolt onto it. That changed in 2026 for two reasons. First, Zed editor kept shipping. Its stable channel moved through version 1.23.2 on October 7 and 1.23.3 on October 12, while its preview channel reached 1.24.2 on the same date, adding bring-your-own-key support for GPT-6.1 Sol, JSONL and NDJSON table previews, and automatic subagent compaction for long-running agent sessions, according to Zed’s own release notes.

Second, JetBrains retired its long-running Fleet editor and replaced it with Air, a public preview product built around coding agents rather than a traditional text buffer. JetBrains describes Fleet’s release history on its own blog, and the transition means anyone comparing “Fleet vs VS Code” in 2026 is already working from outdated information.

Put those two shifts together and you get a search field where “zed editor” now pulls more monthly volume in the United States than most individual VS Code extension queries, and where JetBrains Air shows up in searches from developers who have never heard of Fleet. That is the gap this comparison is built to close.

What Is VS Code in 2026

Visual Studio Code is Microsoft’s free, open-source code editor built on Electron and TypeScript. It remains the default choice for the largest share of professional developers. Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey found that Visual Studio Code was used by 75.9% of respondents, while IntelliJ IDEA was used by 27.1% and Zed by 7.3%, a gap that still defines the market heading into the back half of 2026.

VS Code itself does not ship an AI assistant. Instead, developers bolt one on, almost always GitHub Copilot, which Microsoft owns and sells on a separate pricing ladder. That split between editor and AI layer is the single biggest structural difference between VS Code and both Zed and JetBrains Air, which build their AI features into the core product.

VS Code’s strength has never really been raw speed. It is the extension marketplace, the muscle memory millions of developers already have, and the fact that almost every framework, linter, and cloud provider ships an official VS Code extension on day one. JetBrains’ own 2025 State of C report found that Visual Studio Code was the primary IDE or editor for 42% of C developers specifically, a language community that has traditionally leaned toward heavier, more specialized tooling. That is a sign of how far VS Code’s gravity extends even outside its usual web and scripting strongholds.

What Is Zed Editor in 2026

Zed is a native code editor built in Rust, designed from the ground up around speed and a built-in AI layer rather than an extension model bolted on after the fact. It started as a macOS and Linux tool and now runs on Windows as well, with Zed’s own documentation confirming the editor and its extensions work on the Windows build in 2026.

Zed’s pricing is simple by design. The Personal tier is free forever, the Pro tier runs $10 a month and bundles $5 of AI token usage, and a Business tier is priced at $30 per user per month. Unlike VS Code, where the editor and the AI subscription are two separate purchases from two different product pages, Zed treats AI usage as part of the same bill.

What makes Zed’s October 2026 releases notable is how fast its AI layer is moving. The preview channel added bring-your-own-key support for GPT-6.1 Sol, on-the-fly model selection for subagents, dynamically fetched OpenCode models, and a setting that keeps the system awake during long agent turns, all shipped in the same October 12 build. That pace of iteration, roughly weekly preview releases, is part of why Zed has become the editor developers bring up when they say VS Code feels slow.

What Is JetBrains Air, the Fleet Successor

JetBrains Air launched as a public preview in March 2026 as the successor to Fleet, JetBrains’ earlier attempt at a lightweight, distributed editor. Where Fleet was a conventional editor with remote development built in, Air is explicitly agent-first: it was built to run multiple AI coding agents side by side rather than to be a traditional text editor with AI sprinkled on top.

At launch, Air’s public preview supported a specific set of agents: Codex, Claude Agent, Gemini CLI, and Junie, JetBrains’ own agent. Later 2026 updates expanded that list to include GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Pi, Cline, and other agents that speak the Agent Client Protocol, giving developers a single surface to switch between AI backends instead of committing to one vendor.

Platform support for Air rolled out in stages. The March 2026 announcement said Windows and Linux support was still coming, and a subsequent update added Windows availability by July 2026. JetBrains’ own Fleet blog, which Air inherited, documents that release cadence directly, though note that Fleet itself stopped taking downloads on December 22, 2025 according to third-party reporting, a detail JetBrains has not directly restated in its own primary materials.

Because Air is still in public preview, JetBrains has not published a standalone subscription price for the editor itself. What it has published is pricing for JetBrains AI more broadly, which Air plugs into, and that pricing applies whether a developer is using Air, Rider, or IntelliJ IDEA with JetBrains’ AI assistant enabled.

Zed vs VS Code vs JetBrains Air: Full Specs Comparison

Here is how the three editors line up on the specs that actually change a buying decision, from underlying architecture to how each one handles AI model access.

Spec	VS Code	Zed Editor	JetBrains Air
Vendor	Microsoft	Zed Industries	JetBrains
Core architecture	Electron, TypeScript	Native, built in Rust	Agent-first preview build
Product status (Oct 2026)	Generally available	Generally available, stable and preview channels	Public preview
Latest stable version	Continuously updated monthly release	1.23.3 (Oct 12, 2026)	No fixed version number published
Latest preview/edge build	Insiders build	1.24.2 (Oct 12, 2026)	Rolling preview updates
Predecessor product	N/A	N/A	JetBrains Fleet
Built-in AI assistant	No, requires extension	Yes, native agent and edit predictions	Yes, multi-agent by design
AI model flexibility	Depends on chosen extension	Hosted models, local models, bring-your-own-key	Codex, Claude Agent, Gemini CLI, Junie, Copilot, OpenCode, Pi, Cline
Free tier	Fully free editor	Personal, $0 forever	Free during public preview
Operating systems	Windows, macOS, Linux	macOS, Linux, Windows	macOS at launch, Windows added by July 2026, Linux announced
Extension ecosystem	Largest marketplace of the three	Growing, extensions confirmed working on Windows	Early, agent-focused
Primary audience per Stack Overflow 2025	75.9% of surveyed developers	7.3% of surveyed developers	Not yet tracked in major surveys
Release cadence	Monthly	Weekly or faster on preview channel	Periodic preview updates
Best known for	Breadth of extensions, universal familiarity	Startup speed, Rust-native performance	Running multiple coding agents side by side

Two things jump out of that table. VS Code wins on breadth and familiarity, not on built-in AI. Zed and JetBrains Air both bet on native AI integration, but they take opposite approaches: Zed wants one fast editor with flexible model access, while Air wants to be a neutral surface where several different vendors’ agents compete for the same task.

Performance and Adoption Benchmarks From Three Separate Surveys

There is an honest gap in this market. No independent outlet has yet published a controlled, apples-to-apples speed or memory benchmark covering VS Code, Zed, and JetBrains Air under identical conditions. Even dedicated comparison pieces that focus on just VS Code and Zed, like the Yixscout “Zed vs VS Code” writeup, explicitly decline to publish fixed cold-start or RAM numbers because the test conditions vary too much between machines and project sizes to call it a fair benchmark.

What does exist, and what is arguably more useful for a buying decision, is adoption data from three separate named surveys, each measuring a different slice of the developer population.

Survey	Population	Key finding
Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey	General developer population	VS Code 75.9%, IntelliJ IDEA 27.1%, Zed 7.3%
JetBrains State of C 2025	C developers specifically	VS Code primary editor for 42% of respondents
JetBrains State of .NET 2025	.NET developers specifically	Visual Studio 45%, JetBrains Rider 44%

Reading these three together tells a clearer story than a single speed benchmark ever could. VS Code’s lead shrinks the closer you get to specialized, performance-sensitive language communities. Among general-purpose developers it leads by a wide margin. Among .NET developers, where JetBrains Rider has deep roots, the race between Visual Studio and Rider is basically a coin flip, and VS Code barely registers. Zed, by contrast, is still a minority choice everywhere it has been measured, but 7.3% in a Stack Overflow survey for a Rust-native editor that only reached broad Windows support in the last year is a meaningfully fast climb, not a rounding error.

AI Features Compared: Copilot vs Zed’s Native Agent vs JetBrains Air’s Multi-Agent Model

The AI layer is where these three products diverge the most, and it is the reason this comparison exists at all in 2026. VS Code treats AI as an add-on. GitHub Copilot is the default choice, and it is a separate product with its own pricing, its own update cycle, and its own roadmap that does not always move in lockstep with VS Code itself.

Zed takes the opposite approach. Edit predictions and agent features are built into the editor itself, and the October 2026 preview release shows how aggressively Zed is expanding model choice: bring-your-own-key support for GPT-6.1 Sol, dynamically fetched OpenCode models, and on-the-fly model selection for individual subagents, all in a single release. Zed also added support for Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI GPT-6 variants in September 2026 updates, which means the editor’s AI backend has effectively become model-agnostic within a few months.

JetBrains Air goes a step further than either of them by making agent plurality the entire point of the product. Instead of picking one assistant and optimizing around it, Air was built to run Codex, Claude Agent, Gemini CLI, and Junie side by side from day one, then added GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Pi, and Cline as the Agent Client Protocol ecosystem grew. For a team that cannot agree on which AI vendor to standardize on, or that wants to A/B test agents on the same codebase, Air’s structure solves a problem neither VS Code nor Zed was built to solve.

The tradeoff is maturity. VS Code’s Copilot integration has years of production use behind it. Zed’s native agent features are newer but shipping on a near-weekly cadence. Air’s multi-agent approach is the newest idea of the three and is still a public preview, which means teams adopting it early are accepting some instability in exchange for first access to a genuinely different workflow.

Pricing Breakdown: Free Tiers to Enterprise Seats

None of these three editors charge for the base product. All of the real pricing complexity lives in the AI layer, and that is where the numbers differ the most.

Tier	VS Code + GitHub Copilot	Zed Editor	JetBrains AI (powers Air)
Editor itself	Free	Free (Personal tier)	Free during public preview
Free AI tier	Copilot Free, $0/month	Personal, $0 forever	Not separately broken out
Individual paid tier	Copilot Pro, $10/month	Pro, $10/month, includes $5 token usage	AI Pro, $10/month
Power-user tier	Copilot Pro+, $39/month	Not offered	AI Ultimate, $30/month
Team tier	Copilot Business, $19/user/month	Business, $30/user/month	Enterprise, reported at $60/user/year
Enterprise	Custom, via GitHub sales	Custom for larger teams	Custom, via JetBrains sales

GitHub’s own pricing documentation lists Copilot Free at no cost, Copilot Pro at $10 a month, Copilot Pro+ at $39 a month, and Copilot Business at $19 per seat per month, with Enterprise pricing handled through custom sales conversations rather than a published flat rate. That Pro+ tier at $39 a month is notably the most expensive individual AI subscription among the three editors covered here, well above Zed’s $10 Pro tier or JetBrains’ $10 AI Pro tier.

The JetBrains Enterprise figure deserves a caveat. It has circulated in secondary reporting as $60 per user per year, which would make it dramatically cheaper than either Copilot Business or Zed Business on a per-seat basis, but JetBrains has not confirmed that figure in its own primary pricing pages as being specific to Air. Treat it as a reported number rather than a published one until JetBrains ships Air’s own standalone pricing page.

Extensions, Plugins, and Ecosystem Maturity

VS Code’s extension marketplace is the deepest moat any of these three products has. Nearly every framework, cloud SDK, linter, and formatter ships an official VS Code extension before it ships support anywhere else, simply because VS Code’s install base makes it the default target. That is not a benchmark number, it is a structural fact of how the tooling ecosystem has grown around VS Code for close to a decade.

Zed’s extension story is smaller but deliberate. Rather than trying to match VS Code extension-for-extension, Zed has focused on making sure its existing extensions, including language servers and themes, work consistently across platforms. Zed’s own documentation confirms that extensions function on the Windows build the same way they do on macOS and Linux, which matters for teams that run mixed operating systems and do not want platform-specific gaps in tooling.

JetBrains Air is the newest of the three and, as a public preview, has the thinnest plugin ecosystem. What it lacks in traditional extensions it partly offsets with its agent-first design. Because Air can plug into GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Pi, and Cline through the Agent Client Protocol, it inherits some of the capability those tools bring without needing a native Air-specific extension for every use case. Independent review aggregators that track developer tooling, including sites that round up editor and IDE comparisons for 2026, still treat Air as too new to rank alongside established extension marketplaces.

Platform Support: Windows, macOS, and Linux

VS Code has supported Windows, macOS, and Linux for its entire existence, and that universal coverage is part of why it became the default pick for mixed-OS teams in the first place.

Zed’s platform story moved the fastest in 2026. It started as a macOS and Linux-only product, which kept it out of consideration for Windows-heavy enterprise shops. Zed’s Windows documentation now confirms both the base editor and its extensions run on Windows, closing what had been the single biggest adoption blocker for teams that otherwise liked what Zed was doing on performance and AI integration.

JetBrains Air launched macOS-only in March 2026. By July 2026, JetBrains had added Windows support, and the original announcement described Linux support as coming, though a confirmed Linux release date for Air specifically has not appeared in JetBrains’ own materials as of this comparison. For a JetBrains ecosystem that has historically supported all three major operating systems through products like IntelliJ IDEA and Rider, Air’s staged rollout is a reminder that it is still an early-stage preview product rather than a mature release.

Collaboration and Team Workflows

Real-time collaboration has become table stakes for modern editors, and all three products approach it from a different angle. VS Code’s Live Share extension lets teams share an editing session, though because it is an extension rather than a core feature, it depends on Microsoft continuing to maintain it alongside the base editor.

Zed was built from its earliest versions with multiplayer editing as a design goal rather than an afterthought, reflecting its origins as a project aimed at fixing what its founders saw as friction in collaborative coding. JetBrains Air’s collaboration story is still forming, since the preview’s early focus has been on agent orchestration rather than human-to-human pairing, but the agent-sharing model it does offer, where multiple developers can watch the same AI agent work through a task, is itself a new category of collaboration that neither VS Code nor Zed currently replicates in the same way.

Terminal, Debugging, and Task Runner Support

An editor comparison that only talks about AI chat windows misses half of what developers actually do all day: run builds, step through debuggers, and shell out to package managers. VS Code’s integrated terminal and its debug adapter protocol ecosystem are mature enough that most language extensions ship a working debugger configuration out of the box, which is part of why switching away from VS Code always carries some setup tax even when the new editor is objectively faster.

Zed ships its own integrated terminal and has been steadily building out task running and debugging support alongside its AI features, though it has not matched the sheer breadth of debugger configurations VS Code accumulated over nearly a decade of extension contributions. For teams whose workflow leans heavily on a specific language’s debugger, it is worth testing that exact workflow in Zed before committing, rather than assuming parity with VS Code.

JetBrains Air inherits some of this strength by proxy. Because JetBrains has spent years refining debugging tools inside IntelliJ IDEA and Rider, the underlying technology is not unfamiliar to the company, but Air itself, as a public preview focused on agent orchestration, has not yet published a full debugging and task-runner story of its own. Teams that need heavyweight debugging today are better served staying on an established JetBrains IDE rather than adopting Air for that specific job this quarter.

Learning Curve and Setup Time

Setup friction is often the deciding factor long before anyone benchmarks AI quality or editor speed. VS Code’s learning curve is close to zero for anyone who has touched a modern code editor before, which is a direct byproduct of the same ubiquity Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey captured at 75.9% adoption. New hires rarely need onboarding time dedicated specifically to the editor itself.

Zed’s learning curve is slightly steeper only because fewer teammates already know its specific shortcuts and settings. That gap narrows quickly once a developer applies the VS Code-compatible base keymap covered in the migration guide below, which maps most familiar shortcuts over in a single settings change. The bigger adjustment for most teams is less about keybindings and more about rethinking how AI agents are invoked, since Zed treats the assistant as a first-class panel rather than a sidebar extension.

JetBrains Air asks the most of a new user, not because its interface is complicated, but because its entire premise, choosing and comparing multiple AI agents on the same task, is a workflow most developers have never practiced. Teams adopting Air should budget time for developers to learn not just the editor but a new mental model for delegating work to several agents at once, which is a different skill than prompting a single assistant inside VS Code or Zed.

Real-World Adoption: Who Actually Uses Which Editor

Abstract specs only tell half the story. Here is how adoption actually breaks down across different developer populations, based on the named surveys covered earlier in this piece.

General-purpose development teams: Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey puts VS Code at 75.9% adoption across the broad developer population, making it the default choice for most new teams by a wide margin.
C language shops: JetBrains’ State of C 2025 report found VS Code was the primary editor for 42% of C developers, a surprisingly strong showing for an editor not traditionally associated with systems programming.
.NET development teams: JetBrains’ State of .NET 2025 report found Visual Studio at 45% and JetBrains Rider at 44%, a near-even split that leaves little room for either VS Code or Zed in that specific ecosystem.
Rust and systems programmers: Zed’s native Rust architecture and growing Windows support make it a natural fit for teams already working close to the metal, even though broad survey data for this segment specifically has not yet been published.
Multi-agent AI experimentation teams: JetBrains Air’s support for Codex, Claude Agent, Gemini CLI, Junie, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Pi, and Cline makes it the obvious pick for teams that want to compare AI vendors on the same codebase instead of locking into one.
Enterprise teams already paying for GitHub: Copilot Business at $19 per seat per month, confirmed on GitHub’s own pricing page, keeps many large organizations inside the VS Code ecosystem simply because the AI billing is already set up through GitHub.

What the Survey Data Says

Three named sources, drawn directly from this year’s developer and industry surveys, frame the state of this market better than marketing copy from any single vendor could.

Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey put it plainly: “Visual Studio Code was used by 75.9% of respondents, while IntelliJ IDEA was used by 27.1% and Zed by 7.3%.” That single data point explains why so much of the editor conversation online still centers on VS Code, even as Zed’s search volume climbs.

JetBrains’ own State of C 2025 research found that “Visual Studio Code was the primary IDE or editor for 42% of respondents” among C developers specifically, a language community where tooling choices are usually driven by compiler integration and debugging support rather than general popularity.

And JetBrains’ State of .NET 2025 research reported that Visual Studio was used by 45% of respondents and JetBrains Rider by 44% in 2025, numbers close enough together that the .NET editor race is effectively a toss-up rather than a landslide.

Migration Guide: Moving From VS Code to Zed or JetBrains Air

Switching editors is less painful than it used to be, mainly because both Zed and JetBrains Air were built with VS Code refugees in mind. Here is a practical path for testing either one without burning your existing setup.

Keep VS Code installed. Do not uninstall it during the trial period. Both Zed and Air are meant to run alongside your existing editor while you evaluate them.
Export your current VS Code keybindings and settings so you have a reference point for recreating your muscle memory in the new editor.
Install Zed or download the JetBrains Air public preview from JetBrains’ own distribution channel.
In Zed, set the base keymap to VS Code mode in settings.json so common shortcuts like Ctrl+P and Ctrl+Shift+F behave the way you expect on day one.
Open your actual project, not a toy repository. Editor decisions made on sample code rarely hold up once you are back in a real codebase with your usual extensions and linters.
Connect your AI provider. In Zed, this means adding your API key for bring-your-own-key model access if you are not using the bundled token allowance. In Air, this means picking which agent, Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini CLI, or another supported option, you want to test first.
Run your project’s build and test commands exactly as you normally would, to confirm the new editor’s terminal integration and task runner behave the same way.
Give it a full sprint, not an afternoon. Editor switching costs are front-loaded; most of the friction disappears after a few days of real use.
Compare your actual output, not just the feel of the editor. Track whether AI suggestions are landing cleanly, whether build times changed, and whether your team’s existing extensions have equivalents.
Decide per-project rather than all at once. Nothing requires an entire team to switch simultaneously, and running Zed or Air on a single service while keeping VS Code everywhere else is a reasonable permanent state, not just a transition phase.

A minimal Zed settings.json entry for importing VS Code-style keybindings looks like this:

{
  "base_keymap": "VSCode",
  "vim_mode": false,
  "assistant": {
    "default_model": {
      "provider": "anthropic",
      "model": "claude"
    }
  }
}

That single base_keymap line is usually enough to make the first hour in Zed feel familiar, which is the single biggest predictor of whether a developer sticks with a new editor past the trial week.

Best Use Cases: Which Editor Fits Your Team

There is no universal winner here, and pretending otherwise would ignore how differently these three products are built. Match the editor to the actual constraint your team is working around.

Large, mixed-language enterprise teams: stick with VS Code. The extension marketplace and near-universal developer familiarity outweigh any AI feature gap, especially once Copilot Business is layered on at $19 per seat per month.
Rust, systems, or performance-sensitive codebases: Zed is the natural fit, both for its native architecture and because its Windows support has closed the gap that used to rule it out for mixed-OS shops.
Teams undecided between AI vendors: JetBrains Air’s multi-agent design, supporting Codex, Claude Agent, Gemini CLI, Junie, Copilot, OpenCode, Pi, and Cline, lets you compare agents on identical tasks instead of committing blind.
.NET-heavy organizations: based on JetBrains’ own State of .NET 2025 data showing Visual Studio and Rider splitting that market almost evenly, neither VS Code nor Zed is the obvious upgrade path here. Rider remains the stronger fit.
Budget-conscious solo developers and students: Zed’s free Personal tier plus VS Code’s free Copilot tier both cover the basics without a subscription, making either one a reasonable starting point before paying for anything.
Teams that want one AI subscription tied to existing GitHub billing: Copilot Pro at $10 a month keeps the AI spend inside infrastructure you are probably already paying for, which matters more than editor speed for some finance teams.
Early adopters comfortable with preview software: JetBrains Air is explicitly not finished, but teams that want first access to its agent-sharing collaboration model should expect some rough edges in exchange for being early.

Pros and Cons of Each Editor

VS Code

VS Code’s pros are familiarity, extension depth, and the fact that 75.9% of developers surveyed by Stack Overflow already know how to use it, which eliminates onboarding friction almost entirely. Its cons are that AI is bolted on rather than native, and Copilot’s pricing ladder, topping out at $39 a month for Pro+, is the steepest individual AI tier of the three editors compared here. VS Code also was not the product this comparison found to be the fastest or the most forward-looking on AI architecture, even though it remains the safest default choice.

Zed Editor

Zed’s pros are its native Rust architecture, its now-complete three-platform support including Windows, its rapid release cadence, and an AI subscription priced at $10 a month that bundles token usage rather than charging separately. Its cons are a smaller extension ecosystem than VS Code and a market share that, per Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey, still sits at just 7.3% of the broad developer population, meaning fewer peers to ask for help when something breaks.

JetBrains Air

Air’s pros are its genuinely different multi-agent architecture and the backing of JetBrains, a vendor with a long track record in IDEs through products like Rider and IntelliJ IDEA. Its cons are that it is still a public preview with no fixed version numbering, a staged platform rollout that only reached Windows in July 2026, and pricing that has not been officially confirmed as Air-specific, leaving budget-conscious teams waiting for JetBrains to finalize its numbers before committing.

The Verdict: Which Code Editor Wins in 2026

Judged purely on current adoption, VS Code is not close. Stack Overflow’s 75.9% figure versus Zed’s 7.3% is not a margin that an AI feature list closes overnight, and JetBrains Air is too new to even register in that survey. If the question is simply “what should a new team default to,” the answer is still VS Code, paired with whichever Copilot tier matches the team’s AI usage.

But judged on direction of travel, the picture changes. Zed went from a niche Rust-only curiosity to a fully cross-platform editor with weekly AI model updates in the space of a year, and its $10 all-in AI pricing undercuts Copilot Pro+’s $39 tier by a wide margin for teams that do not need Microsoft’s specific integrations. JetBrains Air, despite being the least mature of the three, is solving a real problem, agent fragmentation, that neither VS Code nor Zed has fully addressed.

The honest verdict: keep VS Code as the safe default for large, mixed teams. Pilot Zed on any project where Rust, performance, or native AI integration actually matters, especially now that Windows support has removed the last platform excuse. And watch JetBrains Air closely over the next two quarters, because a multi-agent editor backed by JetBrains’ enterprise relationships could reshape how teams think about AI vendor lock-in once it leaves public preview.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Zed editor free to use?

Yes. Zed’s Personal tier is free forever. The Pro tier costs $10 a month and includes $5 of AI token usage, and a Business tier is priced at $30 per user per month for teams that need centralized billing and management.

Does Zed editor run on Windows in 2026?

Yes. Zed’s own documentation confirms the editor and its extensions run on Windows, closing a gap that previously limited it to macOS and Linux users only.

What happened to JetBrains Fleet?

JetBrains Fleet was succeeded by JetBrains Air, which launched as a public preview in March 2026. Air builds on Fleet’s distributed editing foundation but reorients the product around running multiple AI coding agents side by side.

How much does GitHub Copilot cost for VS Code?

GitHub’s pricing page lists Copilot Free at no cost, Copilot Pro at $10 a month, Copilot Pro+ at $39 a month, and Copilot Business at $19 per seat per month, with Enterprise pricing handled through custom sales arrangements.

Which AI agents does JetBrains Air support?

Air’s public preview launched supporting Codex, Claude Agent, Gemini CLI, and Junie. Later 2026 updates added GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Pi, Cline, and other agents built on the Agent Client Protocol.

Is VS Code still more popular than Zed?

By a wide margin. Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey found VS Code at 75.9% adoption among surveyed developers compared with 7.3% for Zed, though Zed’s search volume and release pace have both grown quickly through 2026.

Can I use Claude or GPT models inside Zed editor?

Yes. Zed supports hosted models, local models, and bring-your-own-key access, and its 2026 preview releases added support for Claude Opus 5.5, OpenAI GPT-6 variants, and bring-your-own-key access to GPT-6.1 Sol specifically.

Is JetBrains Air ready for production use?

Not fully. Air is still in public preview as of October 2026, with no fixed version numbering and a platform rollout that only reached Windows in July 2026. Teams evaluating it should expect ongoing changes rather than a finished product.

Zed vs VS Code vs JetBrains Air: 75.9% Share Gap [2026]