Continue vs Tabby
A side-by-side comparison of capabilities, autonomy, integrations, and pricing to help you choose.
Short answer: choose Continue if you want open-source ai code assistant and agent for vs code and jetbrains (Supervised agent, freemium); choose Tabby if you want self-hosted, open-source ai coding assistant for privacy-conscious teams (Copilot, freemium).
| Continue | Tabby | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Open-source AI code assistant and agent for VS Code and JetBrains | Self-hosted, open-source AI coding assistant for privacy-conscious teams |
| Type | agent | product-with-agents |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Copilot |
| Pricing | freemium · Free (open source); Hub from $10/mo (reported) | freemium · Free (open-source Community); Team/Enterprise contact sales |
| Best for | developers, mid-market, enterprise | developers, enterprise |
| Deployment | self-hosted, saas | self-hosted, on-prem, api |
| Modalities | text, code | text, code |
| Models | model-agnostic | model-agnostic, open-source |
| Protocols | mcp, function-calling, rest-api | rest-api |
| Integrations | VS Code, JetBrains, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Ollama | VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, GitHub, GitLab |
| Capabilities | 4 documented | 4 documented |
Continue
- +Open source and model-agnostic, including fully local models for private coding
- +Covers autocomplete, edit, chat, and agent in one configurable plugin
- +Continue Hub adds team rules, governance, and shareable assistant blocks
- -Acquired by Cursor in 2026 with the original repo reported read-only; standalone future is uncertain
- -Heavily configuration-driven, which adds setup overhead versus turnkey tools
Tabby
- +True self-hosted/on-prem, no cloud or database dependency; runs on consumer GPUs for air-gapped or regulated environments
- +Open source (Apache 2.0 core), model-agnostic, with an OpenAI-compatible API
- +Actively maintained with broad IDE coverage, repo-aware completion, and an Answer Engine
- -Capability ceiling versus cloud incumbents: fundamentally completion, chat, and retrieval
- -Agentic workflows and MCP are roadmap or private preview, not generally available
Which should you choose?
Continue is open-source ai code assistant and agent for vs code and jetbrains, best for developers, mid-market, enterprise. Tabby is self-hosted, open-source ai coding assistant for privacy-conscious teams, best for developers, enterprise. The right choice depends on the autonomy level you want, your existing integrations, and your budget, all compared above.