Zed

Zed — GPL-licensed Rust editor whose agent panel can host Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI. Zed is a fast, open-source Rust editor with a native agent panel, but its most interesting property in this category is the Agent Client Protocol: external agents run inside Zed's review surface, so you can drive Claude Code or Gemini CLI from an editor rather than a terminal. Bring your own key for free, or pay for hosted models. Local models work. There is no sandbox and no pull-request path. Founded 2021. Open source under GPL-3.0.

We track it in 1 comparison — Coding agents — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 16 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it wins.

• GitHub stars — 62,000, 2nd of 9.

Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.

Where it gives ground.

• Headless / CI — No. Claude Code records Yes.
• Subagents — No. Claude Code records Yes.
• Background agents — No. Claude Code records Yes.
• Hooks — No. Claude Code records Yes.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 24 of 26 tracked fields carry a value for Zed, and 4 of those cite a document you can open. Last verified 2026-01-15. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is Aider. Zed is ahead on MCP (Yes against No) and Permissions (granular allowlist against prompts every action). Aider takes Headless / CI (Yes against No) and Licence (Apache-2.0 against GPL-3.0). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Zed alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Founded

2021

Licence

GPL-3.0 (open source)

Fields we track

24 of 26

Last verified

2026-01-15

The hedge in this category: a fast GPL editor that hosts other people's agents over ACP, so your harness choice stays reversible while you keep a proper review surface. Weak as an agent in its own right — a read-only Ask profile rather than a real plan-and-approve gate, no subagents, no PR path, no headless mode.

Headless / CI

○No15th of 16

Inferred

Subagents

○No10th of 14

Inferred

Background agents

○No12th of 16

Inferred

Hooks

○No7th of 10

Inferred

Licence

GPL-3.09th of 15

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-01-15source

GitHub stars

62,0002nd of 9

Community-reported

Opens PRs

○No10th of 16

Inferred

BYOK

●Yes1st of 16

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

Zed is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• Driving Claude Code or Gemini CLI from an editor instead of a terminal.
• Teams who want a genuinely open-source editor with local-model support.
• GitHub stars is your binding constraint. Zed records 62,000, 2nd of 9 in the Coding agents roster. We define that field as stars on the primary open-source repository, rounded to the nearest thousand.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• Headless / CI. Zed records No on the Coding agents table. Claude Code records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Subagents. Zed records No on the Coding agents table. Claude Code records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Background agents. Zed records No on the Coding agents table. Claude Code records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Hooks. Zed records No on the Coding agents table. Claude Code records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Opens PRs. Zed records No on the Coding agents table. Claude Code records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 2 of the 26 fields we track for Zed are still blank: Terminal-Bench and Bench model. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.