AI Potluck
Product / UX / Orchestration & agents

Zed

Zed Industries

High-performance multiplayer code editor written in Rust by the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter, built for human-AI collaboration. It offers agentic editing, parallel agents across projects, an inline assistant and its own edit-prediction model, and plugs in external agents over the Agent Communication Protocol alongside MCP servers. Models run on the user's own key or on Zed's hosting.

The collaboration server's recorded license entry does not match the files in the repository tree, which needs a curator ruling. Paid tiers layer hosted models and governance on the published editor. Verified 2026-08-14 via the zed-industries/zed repository tree, its license files and the Zed pricing page.

Openness

5 high confidence
5.0
license
GPL-3.0-or-later(editor)+GPL-3.0(collab-server, crates/collab/LICENSE-GPL)+Apache-2.0(GPUI)
source
public
commercial
Zed-Pro/Business(hosted AI)
core-gated
ungated(the whole editor and the collab server are in the repo under GPL/Apache

Fully open editor core under GPL and Apache, with the paid tiers selling Zed-hosted AI and an org admin layer over it. A full untruncated recursive tree of zed-industries/zed at main is 5,130 entries in which every crate carries LICENSE-GPL or LICENSE-APACHE, including crates/collab, the collaboration server - so the server is published too - and there is no ee, enterprise, commercial or proprietary path anywhere. The collab server is GPL-3.0 rather than AGPL-3.0: an untruncated tree of 5,137 entries holds no path containing AGPL at all, against 215 LICENSE-GPL files and 47 LICENSE-APACHE, and a direct read of crates/collab lists LICENSE-GPL beside Cargo.toml, migrations, k8s, seed, src and tests. Both licenses are OSI-approved, so taking the most restrictive across parts still lands on open source. zed.dev/pricing runs Personal at $0 forever with unlimited use on your own API keys, while Pro and Business sell Zed-hosted model inference and a hosted admin dashboard at dashboard.zed.dev; Zed says of the Business controls that "Since Zed is open source, these controls govern Zed's hosted services specifically", and the FAQ confirms you can bring your own keys or disable AI entirely. A hosted inference quota is not an editor feature withheld from the published source.

  • https://github.com/zed-industries/zed recorded 2026-06-18

    Rust, ~85k stars, GPL/AGPL/Apache licensing

  • https://api.github.com/repos/zed-industries/zed/git/trees/main?recursive=1 recorded 2026-08-11

    Full untruncated recursive tree, 5,130 entries. Root LICENSE-GPL and LICENSE-APACHE; every crate under crates/ carries one or the other, including crates/collab/LICENSE-GPL (the collaboration server) and crates/gpui/LICENSE-APACHE. Zero paths containing AGPL. No enterprise/, ee/, commercial/ or proprietary/ path.

  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zed-industries/zed/main/LICENSE-GPL recorded 2026-08-11

    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, 29 June 2007 - the full GPL-3.0 text, 34,357 bytes.

  • https://zed.dev/pricing recorded 2026-08-11

    Personal $0 forever: '2,000 accepted edit predictions', 'Unlimited use with your API keys or external agents like Claude Agent, Codex CLI'. Pro $10/mo: unlimited edit predictions, $5 of tokens, Zed-hosted models. Business $30/seat: org-wide AI model policies, data governance controls, RBAC. FAQ: 'Since Zed is open source, these controls govern Zed's hosted services specifically', admin surface at dashboard.zed.dev, and 'Can I use Zed without the AI features? Yes!'

  • https://api.github.com/repos/zed-industries/zed/git/trees/main?recursive=1 recorded 2026-08-14

    Fresh untruncated recursive tree, 5,137 entries, `truncated: false`. Root LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-GPL; 215 paths ending LICENSE-GPL and 47 ending LICENSE-APACHE; crates/collab/LICENSE-GPL present. ZERO paths containing AGPL anywhere in the tree, which is what retires the recorded AGPL-3.0 part. No ee/, enterprise/, commercial/ or proprietary/ top-level path.

  • https://api.github.com/repos/zed-industries/zed/contents/crates/collab recorded 2026-08-14

    Direct listing of the collaboration server crate - .env.toml, Cargo.toml, LICENSE-GPL, README.md, k8s, migrations.sqlite, migrations, seed.default.json, seed, src, tests. The license file beside the server's own source is LICENSE-GPL, not an AGPL file.

  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zed-industries/zed/main/LICENSE-GPL recorded 2026-08-14

    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, 29 June 2007 - the full GPL-3.0 text, 34,357 bytes.

  • https://zed.dev/pricing recorded 2026-08-14

    Personal $0 forever with 'Unlimited use with your API keys or external agents'; Pro and Business sell Zed-hosted models and an org admin surface; 'Since Zed is open source, these controls govern Zed's hosted services specifically'.

Adoption

4 medium confidence
4.0

A widely-used released editor with paid Pro/Business tiers, but no public install count.

  • https://zed.dev/pricing recorded 2026-08-13

    Personal $0 forever, Pro $10 per month, Business per seat; released product with direct download and no install, download or user count published

Capability

5 high confidence
5.0

Full AI-editor feature set on par with Cursor/Windsurf, model-agnostic.

  • https://zed.dev recorded 2026-08-13

    agentic editing, Zeta2 edit prediction, ACP and MCP support, multi-model

  • https://zed.dev/pricing recorded 2026-08-13

    free tier includes "unlimited use with your API keys or external agents like Claude Agent, Codex CLI, and more"; paid tiers sell Zed-hosted models

Verified 2026-08-13