Amp vs Continue — Which AI Agent Is Better?
An in-depth comparison of Amp and Continue across output quality, autonomy, reliability, speed, value, and ease of use. Vote for your favorite.
An in-depth comparison of Amp and Continue across output quality, autonomy, reliability, speed, value, and ease of use. Vote for your favorite.
Pick a winner in each category — you can change your vote anytime.
AmpContinueChoose Amp if you are teams that want maximum-capability agentic coding and will pay for tokens at cost. Choose Continue if you are developers who want full control over their AI coding assistant.
In our editorial scoring, Amp leads in 4 of six categories (output quality, autonomy, reliability and speed), while Continue leads in 1 (value). On price, Amp runs usage-based credits / free tier and is proprietary; Continue runs free (byo api key) and is open source.
Amp is Sourcegraph's take on agentic coding: no model picker, no knobs — it always runs frontier models with maximum reasoning and leans into autonomy. Work happens in shareable threads across the VS Code extension and CLI, with subagents for parallelizable work and team visibility into how colleagues prompt. It's deliberately opinionated and token-hungry; credits are consumed at cost, so sustained heavy use gets expensive, and there's no BYO-key escape hatch.
Continue is an open-source AI coding assistant that works as an extension for VS Code and JetBrains IDEs. It offers chat, autocomplete, and inline editing with full control over which models you use. Highly customizable with support for local models, cloud APIs, and custom context providers.
Both work with any OpenAI-compatible provider. Point the base URL at Standard Compute and get frontier-model compute with no usage limits from $39/mo flat — no per-token billing, no 429 rate limits.
Weighing the cost of running it? Cheapest API for Continue
Continue runs on Standard Compute
