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Zed

The editor for what's nextOpen source

About Zed

Zed is an open-source code editor in Rust from Zed Industries, drawn on the GPU by its own GPUI framework instead of Electron, with multiplayer editing, Git, a debugger, remoting, an agent panel and external agents such as Claude Agent and Codex. As of 2026-10-25: 92,159 stars, stable v1.25.3, GPL-3.0-or-later; Personal is free, Pro $10 a month, Business $30 per seat.

EditorialUpdated 10 min read

The Zed interface

What it is

Zed is a desktop code editor. Its GitHub description reads "a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter." It does not take the Electron route: the 1.0 announcement says the team wrote its own UI framework, GPUI, from scratch in Rust and organized the whole application around feeding data to GPU shaders, closer to a video game than a web page. The Windows announcement says that on Windows the interface renders through DirectX 11 and text through DirectWrite, to match the look of the system itself.

As of 2026-10-25 the GitHub repository has 92,159 stars and 11,212 forks, with Rust as the main language. The 1.0 post says the codebase exceeds a million lines and that hundreds of thousands of developers rely on Zed to ship software each day (as reported by the vendor).

On platforms, the README says macOS, Linux and Windows builds can be downloaded directly or obtained through each platform's package managers, while a web version is still under discussion. Every version on the stable releases page offers macOS builds for Apple Silicon and Intel, Windows builds for x64 and ARM64, and Linux builds for x86_64 and AArch64.

Releases come weekly. The FAQ says that every Wednesday last week's preview is promoted to stable and a new preview branch is cut from main, with important fixes cherry-picked between minor releases. As of 2026-10-25 the latest stable release is v1.25.3, published on GitHub at 2026-10-23 21:45 (UTC+8); it only updates dependencies to address recently disclosed vulnerabilities in the wider ecosystem.

Code at the speed of thought.

zed.dev pricing page

Core capabilities

First, native rendering. Everything from windows to text is drawn by GPUI. The open-source announcement says GPUI is Apache-2.0, so anyone can use it to build high-performance desktop apps and release them under a license of their choosing. The Windows post asks for feedback on IMEs, keyboard layouts, multiple monitors and 120–144 Hz displays.

Second, AI and agents. Zed has its own agent panel that can run several agents in parallel, and edit predictions suggest the next change at keystroke granularity. Through the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), agents from Claude Agent, Codex, OpenCode and Cursor run inside Zed; the 1.0 post names them. Users who do not want to pay Zed can bring their own API keys; the pricing page lists Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic, GitHub Copilot, DeepSeek, Google AI, LM Studio, Mistral, Ollama, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Vercel and more. Users who want no AI at all have been able, since 2025-07, to add disable_ai to settings.json and switch every AI feature off at once.

Third, collaboration. Real-time multiplayer editing has been a design goal from the start, and Channels arrived with the 2024-01 open-source release, which bring another person into the same code through a link. The 2025-08 Series B post introduced DeltaDB, which uses CRDTs to record every edit as an operation and interoperates with Git. On 2026-08-12 the team launched Delta, a separate app built on DeltaDB, in private beta; the Delta post says DeltaDB will eventually come to Zed, and for now the two are separate products.

Fourth, a complete development environment. The 1.0 post lists Git integration, SSH remoting, a debugger and rainbow brackets. On Windows, Zed can open folders inside a WSL distribution directly: a lightweight remote server process handles file I/O, Git, terminals, tasks, language servers and debuggers, the same mechanism used for SSH remoting. Extensions run as WebAssembly components with sandboxed filesystem access through WASI, so one extension works on all three platforms. The extensions page speaks of "hundreds" of community extensions; as of 2026-10-26, the extensions page lists 7.6M downloads for the HTML extension.

Who it's for / Not for

Good fit:

  • Developers who find Electron editors sluggish and are willing to switch, especially on projects that lean on language servers rather than one heavyweight plugin.
  • People who want to switch between several AI agents in one editor while keeping control of keys and bills: built-in agents, ACP external agents, user-supplied keys and local models all work.
  • People who want no AI at all: one setting switches every AI feature off and the editor works as usual.
  • Small teams that pair-program, develop remotely or work inside WSL.
  • Developers who want to read a large Rust desktop codebase, or build their own desktop app on GPUI.

Not a fit:

  • Anyone who depends on a VS Code extension with no counterpart on Zed's extensions page. Zed extensions are WebAssembly components, a different system from VS Code extensions.
  • Companies whose procurement requires SSO or a SOC 2 report. The Business post says this release does not meet those requirements yet and that SAML/OIDC, SCIM and SOC 2 certification are in progress; as of 2026-10-25, the pricing page still lists SSO, SAML and SCIM as "planned but not currently available."
  • People who only want to code in a browser: the README says the web version has not launched.
  • Environments that need an editor version to stay put: Zed ships weekly, the FAQ warns that preview may revert recently added features, and stable also updates every week.

How it compares

Against VS Code: on 2026-10-25 the microsoft/vscode repository has 194,267 stars under MIT, and it was created at 2015-09-04 04:23 (UTC+8). VS Code is built on Electron, and the 1.0 post notes that Electron grew out of the team's own Atom work. Zed differs in native rendering, built-in multiplayer and an agent panel that needs no plugin.

Against GitHub Copilot: Copilot is a service, not an editor, and Zed itself can use Copilot as a model source. On 2026-10-25 the Copilot plans page lists Free at $0, Pro at $10 a month, Pro+ at $39 a month and Max at $100 a month, with bundled GitHub AI credits of limited usage, $15, $70 and $200 respectively. Zed Pro is also $10 a month, with $5 of tokens included and usage beyond that billed at the model vendor's list price plus 10%.

Against Cursor: on 2026-10-25 the Cursor pricing page lists individual plans of Free at $0, Plus at $8 a month, Premium at $30 a month, Super at $100 a month and Ultra at $200 a month, and notes that Plus offers Grok models only, with third-party models billed at API rates. Cursor bundles model usage into the subscription; Zed moved to token-based pricing in 2025-09, and its Business seats include no model credits.

Getting started

  1. Packages are on zed.dev, and the README also lists package-manager installs; macOS, Windows and Linux each offer both x86 and ARM builds.
  2. "disable_ai": true in settings.json turns every AI feature off; the 2025-07 post also announced a switch in new-user onboarding to turn all AI off.
  3. AI has three routes: user-supplied API keys on the Personal plan; external agents such as Claude Agent or Codex through ACP; or the 14-day Pro trial. The trial includes $5 of GPT-6 Luna usage, needs no credit card, ends when the $5 is used or 14 days pass, and offers only that one hosted model.
  4. Remote development: project: open remote in the command palette connects to an SSH server or a WSL distribution. Zed starts a lightweight server process on the remote side, where language servers and terminals run.
  5. The preview channel gets new features a week ahead of stable; automatic update checks can be turned off in settings, after which updates are applied manually.
  6. Contributing follows CONTRIBUTING.md and requires signing the Contributor License Agreement (CLA). The repository's AI policy welcomes LLM-assisted code but requires contributors to genuinely understand it, rejects PRs submitted by autonomous agents, and asks that conversations with maintainers not be handed wholesale to a model.

Pricing & license

As of 2026-10-25, the pricing page has three plans:

  • Personal: $0, free forever; unlimited use with user-supplied API keys or external agents.
  • Pro: $10 a month, with unlimited edit predictions and $5 of tokens; beyond that, usage is billed at the vendor's list price plus 10%, charged at every additional $10 or at month end, with an optional spending cap.
  • Business: $30 per seat per month, no minimum seat count, month-to-month available; order forms at 25+ seats. Seats include no model credits. Admins can disable hosted models model by model, turn off edit predictions org-wide, lock data-sharing settings and set global token spend limits for hosted models.

Price changes: the 2025-09-24 post cut Pro from $20 to $10 a month and moved billing from prompts (500 a month) to tokens. The post's reason was that LLM bills had become the company's largest expense, so more paying users meant larger losses (as reported by the vendor). A 2026-05-05 post added that before the change the company sold tokens at a loss to most paying AI users.

Sponsorship: the pricing page and README say Zed Industries accepts sponsorship through GitHub Sponsors; the money is treated as general company income and buys no paid features or support.

License: the README says the source is mainly GPL-3.0-or-later, with components marked Apache-2.0. The GPL license file was added by commit f2ff7fa at 2024-01-24 07:26 (UTC+8), which moved every AGPL crate except collab to GPL; before that, commit 678bddd at 2024-01-23 23:56 (UTC+8) added the AGPL and Apache license files. Commit 27c566c at 2026-05-29 04:19 (UTC+8) moved the collab backend from AGPL to GPL as well, deleted the root AGPL file and added a check that keeps first-party crates from reintroducing AGPL; its message says the change reaches preview in the week of 2026-06-01 and stable in the week of 2026-06-08.

Risks & limits

Security advisories: as of 2026-10-25 the GitHub advisories page lists 12, of which 1 is critical, 9 high and 2 medium, the earliest from 2025-08. The critical GHSA-x34m-39xw-g2wr (CVE-2025-55012), published 2025-08-11 23:48 (UTC+8), covers remote code execution through the AI agent and was fixed in 0.197.3. Five advisories published together on 2026-05-08 22:37–22:42 (UTC+8) cover bypasses of the terminal tool permission allowlist, command injection in SSH and WSL remoting, and arbitrary code execution from opening a repository with a malicious .git/config.

Data and privacy: the Business post says that on any plan Zed does not store prompts or train on user code unless the user explicitly shares or opts in (as reported by the vendor).

Commercial model: the README says Zed is developed by Zed Industries, a for-profit company. The 2024-01 open-source announcement said proprietary products for commercial and enterprise use might come later, but always as a tiny fraction of the open code. The 2026-05-05 post says near-term revenue comes from Zed for Business and the long-term direction is a collaborative space where humans and AI agents work together, which is the Delta line.

Maintenance load: as of 2026-10-25 the GitHub search API shows 23,463 issues (2,303 open) and 33,539 PRs (792 open).

Contributor concentration: on 2026-10-25 the GitHub contributors API (anon=0) returns 483 accounts; the three accounts with the most commits have 4,443, 3,594 and 2,896.

How it got here

The Zed team previously built Atom. The 1.0 post recalls that Atom was a fork of Chromium that spawned the Electron framework, which later became the foundation of VS Code; the team found that no amount of work could take Atom past the ceiling of its platform, so it started over.

  • 2021-02-20 11:01 (UTC+8): the GitHub repository is created. The first commit, b400449, is written by Nathan Sobo at 2021-02-21 01:02 (UTC+8), described as starting a rebuild with a cleanly separated UI framework.
  • 2024-01-24: Zed goes open source, with the editor under GPL, server components under AGPL and GPUI under Apache-2.0; Channels launches at the same time.
  • 2025-08-11 23:48 (UTC+8): the first critical advisory is published.
  • 2025-08-20: a $32M Series B led by Sequoia Capital is announced, bringing total funding past $42M (as reported by the vendor).
  • 2025-09-24: AI billing moves from prompts to tokens and Pro drops to $10 a month.
  • 2025-10-15: the Windows version ships, announced by Max Brunsfeld; the team says it will keep a full-time Windows team.
  • 2026-04-29 22:31 (UTC+8): v1.0.0 is published on GitHub.
  • 2026-05-06: Zed for Business launches at $30 per seat per month.
  • 2026-05-29 04:19 (UTC+8): collab moves to GPL and the repository stops using AGPL.
  • 2026-08-12: the team launches Delta in private beta.
  • 2026-10-23 21:45 (UTC+8): v1.25.3 is published.

Our verdict

Zed's interface is drawn on the GPU by its own GPUI framework rather than Electron; it has a built-in agent panel, runs external agents such as Claude Agent and Codex through ACP, and accepts user-supplied API keys; stable releases ship weekly, with builds for macOS, Windows and Linux; the Personal plan is free, and since collab moved from AGPL to GPL in 2026-05 the repository no longer uses AGPL.

Its limits: extensions are WebAssembly components, a different system from VS Code extensions; as of 2026-10-25 the pricing page lists SSO, SAML and SCIM as "planned but not currently available," and the Business post says SOC 2 certification is in progress; as of 2026-10-25 the GitHub advisories page lists 12 advisories, 1 critical and 9 high, and the five published together on 2026-05-08 cover bypasses of the terminal tool permission allowlist and command injection in SSH and WSL remoting; Business seats include no model credits.

Why it stands out

Zed is what the Atom team built after learning everything Atom taught them. It is written in Rust, renders its own UI on the GPU, and treats multiplayer editing and language servers as first-class rather than bolted on.

Max Brunsfeld, one of its founders, also created tree-sitter, which the editor uses to parse code and understand syntax. The AI features arrived later and were built on the same foundation rather than a webview.

It is written in Rust, renders its UI on the GPU, and builds in multiplayer editing and language servers.

Sources

Official

  1. zed-industries/zed on GitHubGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  2. Zed READMEGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  3. Zed LICENSE-GPLGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  4. Zed commit f2ff7fa: change AGPL-licensed crates to GPL, except collab (#4231)GitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  5. Zed commit 678bddd: add crate licenses (#4158)GitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  6. Zed commit 27c566c: relicense Zed source code under GPL (#57948)GitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  7. Zed commit b400449: start rebuilding with a cleanly-separated UI frameworkGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  8. Zed CONTRIBUTING.md, including the AI policyGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026

Updates & reading