I’ve been using GitHub Copilot for about a year now. It’s good. Really good. But not everyone wants to pay $10 a month for autocomplete. Some people code once a week. Some are students. Some just want to see if AI-assisted coding actually helps them before committing to a subscription.
So I spent the last couple weeks testing the free alternatives. Codeium, Tabnine, IntelliCode. Plus some language server plugins that don’t get enough credit. Here’s what I found. Wait, actually let me back up. I should mention that I’m not a full-time developer. I write code maybe three or four times a week. Mostly Python scripts, some PHP for my blog, occasional JavaScript when I break something on my site. So my perspective might be different from someone who codes for a living.
I think we need to start with why you’d want a code completion plugin in the first place. The short version is: it saves you from typing stuff you’ve typed a thousand times before. If you’ve ever written for i in range() for the hundredth time, you know what I mean. It also catches little mistakes. Misspelled variable names. Wrong parameter order. Things that waste five minutes of debugging for no good reason. For beginners, it’s honestly useful just to see what methods exist on an object. You don’t have to memorize everything anymore.
Codeium was the first one I tried because everyone keeps saying it’s the “free Copilot.” And honestly? It’s pretty close. I opened VS Code, installed the extension, signed in — took maybe two minutes. The completions popped up as I typed, fast enough that I didn’t notice any lag. It handles Python, JavaScript, PHP, Go, C++. Like 70-something languages, they claim. I only tested maybe five of them.
Here’s the thing though. It does generate code that feels a bit… off sometimes. Like it’ll suggest a function that works but uses a style completely different from the rest of my file. One time it suggested a one-liner for something I wanted to do in four lines. It was clever but I didn’t want clever. I wanted readable. Also their documentation? Mostly in English actually. I heard people complain about Chinese docs being limited but I didn’t run into that problem. Maybe they updated it.
But Codeium is completely free. For personal use and commercial use too. That’s a big deal because some tools only let you use them for free if you’re not making money from your code. Codeium doesn’t care. That alone makes it worth trying.
Tabnine was next. And I’ll be honest — I’ve used Tabnine before. Years ago. Back when it was just a local autocomplete thing. Now it’s AI-powered but they have this free tier that gives you basic completions. I installed it, typed a few lines, and it worked. Nothing amazing. It filled in variable names and boilerplate. It didn’t seem to understand context the way Codeium does. Like if I was working on a Django project, it wouldn’t suggest Django-specific patterns. Just generic Python stuff.
That might be enough for some people. If you write code occasionally and you don’t need the AI to guess your intent, Tabnine free tier is fine. But I found myself hitting tab less often. The suggestions weren’t wrong. They just weren’t helpful enough to make me want to rely on them. Their pro version has better context but I wasn’t about to pay to test that. That defeats the purpose of this whole exercise.
IntelliCode surprised me. Not because it’s amazing, but because it’s from Microsoft and nobody talks about it. I installed it expecting something basic. It’s basically IntelliSense with some AI sprinkled on top. It learns from patterns in your codebase and recommends the most common APIs. For C# and TypeScript, it’s genuinely useful. For Python, it’s fine but not mind-blowing.
The thing about IntelliCode is it doesn’t try to predict entire chunks of code. It’s more like “here’s what you probably want to type next based on what you’ve typed before.” It’s safer. Less hallucination. You won’t get a random function that doesn’t exist. But you also won’t get the “oh wow it guessed what I was about to write” moment. Good for Microsoft-heavy ecosystems. Not a general-purpose AI assistant.
I should mention something that I think gets overlooked. Language server plugins. Pylance for Python. Intelephense for PHP. gopls for Go. These aren’t AI prediction tools. They’re more like intelligent type checkers. They know your code structure and give you accurate completions based on that. They won’t guess your next function. But they’ll never suggest something wrong either. And they’re all free.
I actually use Pylance alongside Codeium. Codeium handles the AI predictions. Pylance handles the type checking and accurate completions. They don’t interfere with each other. That combo works pretty well for me. Your mileage may vary but it’s worth experimenting.
Now let me talk about the “vibe” of using these tools. Because that matters more than you’d think. Codeium feels like working with a junior developer who’s read a lot of documentation but doesn’t fully understand your codebase. Sometimes it’s helpful. Sometimes it’s confidently wrong. Tabnine feels like a senior developer who’s too busy to pay attention — makes correct suggestions but misses the context. IntelliCode is like a librarian. Knows everything about the books you have, doesn’t guess what you’re looking for.
Honestly I wasn’t expecting this, but I kept going back to language server plugins for most of my work. The AI stuff is fun but it interrupts my flow sometimes. I’ll be typing, and it pops up a suggestion that’s close but not quite right. I spend a second deciding whether to accept or ignore. That adds up.
Oh, I should have said this earlier — I tested all of these on a 2019 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM. Not a beast but not a potato either. Codeium and IntelliCode were snappy. Tabnine felt a little heavier for some reason. Maybe it was running something locally. Not sure.
The real question is whether these tools actually make you faster. I think they do, but not dramatically. Maybe 10% to 20% if you’re writing repetitive code. Less if you’re doing something novel. I timed myself writing a small Flask API with and without Codeium. Took 22 minutes with Codeium, 28 without. That’s not nothing but it’s not life-changing either. Wait, I should double check that timing. It might have been closer to 18 and 25. I don’t remember exactly.
If you’re a professional developer writing code every day, the $10 a month for Copilot is probably worth it. It’s more accurate, more context-aware, and integrates better. But for now, I’ll stick with Codeium for my personal projects. We’ll see.
