In prior evaluations, we benchmarked both open-source and paid agentic CLIs, focusing on their performance in web development tasks, and some open-source agents performed as successfully as the paid options. Therefore, we also listed the top 8 open source coding agents for users with privacy concerns.
The top open-source AI coding agents
You can also see the GitHub stars of these agents:
Agentic IDEs
Agentic IDEs are the coding agents with a GUI. Some popular but non-open-source examples in this category are Cursor, Antigravity, and Windsurf.
Agentic CLI tools
These are the agents run directly in the command-line interface (CLI), rather than being integrated into full-featured IDEs (such as VS Code). Claude Code is the most popular non-open-source tool in that category.
The different approaches to open source AI coding agents
When choosing an AI coding tool, it’s important to understand that “open source” doesn’t always mean “free to use.” These tools generally fall into two distinct categories based on how you access the underlying language models.
Bring Your Own Key (BYOK): Tools like Aider let you plug in API keys from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The tool is a client. You choose and pay for the model separately. This gives you flexibility to switch providers, compare models, or use whichever offers the best price-to-performance ratio for your needs. You’re still paying for API usage, but you control where that money goes.
Self-hosted local models: For maximum control and privacy, some tools support running models locally via Ollama, llama.cpp, or similar runtimes. You run everything on your own hardware. This means no API costs and no data leaving your machine. The trade-off is that local models typically lag behind frontier models in terms of capability, and you need sufficient hardware to run them effectively. Local models have upfront hardware costs but no per-token fees, while API usage can add up quickly for heavy use.
This is the only true no-cost way to use these open-source AI coding tools if you have the necessary hardware.
Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE and NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and resources that referenced AIMultiple.
Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised enterprises on their technology decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.
He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.
Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.
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