What is Zed?
Zed is listed under AI IDEs & Editors, in the Code & Development category on Flocci AI Tools. Blazing-fast, Rust-built editor. It is freemium — a usable free tier with paid plans above it, and it lives at zed.dev.
What Zed does
- Blazing-fast, Rust-built editor
- Agentic editing and prediction
- Real-time collaboration
- Free and open-source core
Zed — straight answers
Is Zed free?
Zed is freemium: there is a free tier you can work in and paid plans above it. It is one of 426 freemium tools in the catalog, all labelled the same way so you are never surprised by a paywall.
Can I use Zed in a browser, or is there an app?
Zed needs to be installed or self-hosted — it doesn't run in a browser tab. It is available on Mac, Linux and Windows.
What can Zed do?
Zed does 4 things the catalog singles out: Blazing-fast, rust-built editor; agentic editing and prediction; real-time collaboration; free and open-source core.
What is the best free alternative to Zed?
Eclipse Theia IDE is the closest free alternative: it sits in the same AI IDEs & Editors sub-category and is free. Kiro, CodeBuddy (Tencent) and Cursor also start free. The full list is on the alternatives page.
See the full list →Zed alternatives
Compare all alternatives →Cursor
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Google Antigravity
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- Google's agent-first IDE
- Powered by Gemini 3 models
- Autonomous multi-step coding
- Free access tier
Windsurf
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- Free tier available
Kiro
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- AWS's spec-driven agentic IDE
- Turns requirements into plans and code
- Hooks and steering files
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Trae
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- ByteDance's free AI IDE
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- Access to frontier models
- Generous free usage
JetBrains Junie
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- Plans and executes multi-step coding tasks in-IDE
- Deep integration with JetBrains code intelligence/refactoring