Aider vs Continue: Which AI Agent Is Better?
An in-depth comparison of Aider and Continue across output quality, autonomy, reliability, speed, value, and ease of use. Vote for your favorite.
An in-depth comparison of Aider and Continue across output quality, autonomy, reliability, speed, value, and ease of use. Vote for your favorite.
Either way, you pay for the model calls. A median coding-agent day on our gateway is 95 requests and 8.6 million tokens. The table prices every step at one model’s rate.
Both run on Standard Compute, where each step goes to the cheapest model that can do it: routine steps go to efficient open models, hard ones to frontier models such as Claude Fable 5.1 or GPT-6 Astra.
| Model | Typical day | Busy day |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $7.34 | $59.10 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $3.67 | $29.55 |
| GPT-6 Luna | $0.23 | $2.43 |
Fixed monthly plans from $19. Eligible new accounts can try $0.25 of compute first, no card. Trial terms
Pick a winner in each category. You can change your vote anytime. 2 votes cast so far.
AiderContinueChoose Aider if you are developers who want a flexible, BYO-model terminal coding tool. Choose Continue if you are developers who want full control over their AI coding assistant.
In our editorial scoring, Aider leads in 3 of six categories (output quality, autonomy and reliability), while Continue leads in 2 (value and ease of use). On price, Aider runs free (byo api key) and is open source; Continue runs free (byo api key), no longer maintained and is open source.
Across 2 community votes on this matchup, the community has it tied. Cast your own vote above to move the needle.
What it costs to run Aider or Continue
Best API for Aider →
5 options compared, with prices and limits
Best API for Continue →
4 options compared, with prices and limits
Standard Compute sends each step to the cheapest model that can do it, on providers we vet for price, uptime and speed. Plans start at $19 a month, and eligible new accounts can try $0.25 of compute with no card. Choose your agent below to connect.
Aider is an open-source (Apache 2.0) AI pair programming tool that works in your terminal. It can edit multiple files, understand your git history, create commits, and works with virtually any LLM via API. It earned its reputation with a practical approach to real-world coding tasks and strong benchmark scores, but development has gone quiet: the last release was 0.86.2 in February 2026 and the last commit came in May 2026.
Continue is an open-source (Apache 2.0) AI coding assistant for VS Code and JetBrains IDEs, plus a CLI. It offers chat, autocomplete, and inline editing with full control over which models you use, including local models, cloud APIs, and custom context providers. It is no longer developed: the Continue team joined Cursor, the GitHub repo is read-only, and the last release (2.1.0 for VS Code) shipped in June 2026. The extension still installs and works, but expect no fixes for new models or editor versions.
Aider and Continue both run on Standard Compute
