GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered developer tool that acts as a pair programmer throughout the software development lifecycle, from inline code suggestions and chat assistance in the editor to autonomous coding agents that can plan, execute, and open pull requests. Originally launched in technical preview in June 2021 as a collaboration between GitHub and OpenAI, Copilot has grown into the world's most widely adopted AI coding assistant, used by millions of individual developers and tens of thousands of businesses.

At its core, Copilot analyzes the code and context in a developer's editor to generate context-aware completions, explain concepts, and propose edits. Its agent mode can make coordinated changes across multiple files with a Keep/Undo review workflow, while its cloud-based coding agent can be assigned directly to a GitHub issue to work autonomously in the background and open a pull request when done. Developers can choose from a broad catalog of underlying LLMs, including OpenAI, Anthropic's Claude, and other models optimized for speed, accuracy, or cost, and extend Copilot's capabilities through MCP server integrations and third-party agents like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex.

Copilot is natively built into GitHub and works across popular editors including Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, Xcode, Eclipse, and Raycast, as well as the command line via Copilot CLI and GitHub Mobile. For organizations, Copilot Business and Enterprise plans add license management, policy controls, budget governance, IP indemnity, and for Enterprise, codebase indexing for deeper, more tailored suggestions. Companies like Duolingo, Shopify, and Grupo Boticário use Copilot to accelerate development workflows, with GitHub reporting that developers using Copilot are up to 55% more productive without sacrificing code quality.

GitHub Copilot Free costs $0/user/month and includes 2,000 completions per month, access to models like Haiku 4.5 and GPT-5 mini, Copilot CLI, and community support. Pro costs $10/user/month and adds cloud agent and code review access, unlimited code completion and next-edit suggestions, access to third-party agents like Claude Code and Codex, model selection, and $15 in monthly total credits. Pro+ costs $39/user/month and adds premium models including Opus, audit logs, 4x+ more included usage than Pro, and $70 in monthly credits. Max costs $100/user/month for sustained high-volume agent workflows, with priority access to new models, 2.9x+ more usage than Pro+, and $200 in monthly credits. For businesses, the Business plan costs $19/user/month with unlimited code completion, cloud agent and code review access, a broad model catalog, access control, budget governance, and IP indemnity. Enterprise costs $39/user/month with everything in Business plus priority access to new models and 2x the included usage. GitHub AI Credits (1 credit = $0.01) meter usage for chat, agents, CLI, Spaces, and Spark beyond the included monthly allowance.