Aider vs Sourcegraph Cody
Aider is a free open-source terminal pair programmer (Apache License 2.0 for the software; you supply model access, so provider or local-compute costs are separate and there is no universal monthly total). Sourcegraph Cody is a different product from the chatbot Cody: its individual Free and Pro plans ended July 23, 2025, and Cody now ships only inside Sourcegraph Enterprise; Sourcegraph's platform pricing starts at a $16K minimum annual contract, which is a platform contract floor, not a Cody per-seat price and not by itself proof of Cody entitlement. Individuals should default to Aider; large organizations already on Sourcegraph Enterprise should evaluate Cody for codebase-wide search. No coding-quality shootout was run.
| Decision point | Aider | Sourcegraph Cody |
|---|---|---|
| Best suited to | Developers who work in a local Git repository and want an LLM to edit code with them from the command line. | Large organizations already on Sourcegraph Enterprise that need codebase-wide search-backed coding help. |
| Plans and cost | Aider's official linked repository publishes its software under Apache License 2.0, with a no-charge, royalty-free grant. You provide the model: paid APIs, free providers with limits, or local hardware. The software licence does not make external LLM usage or computing free. | Individual Free and Pro plans ended July 23, 2025; Cody now ships only inside Sourcegraph Enterprise, and Enterprise Starter does not include Cody. Sourcegraph's current platform pricing starts at a $16K minimum annual contract for the platform; that figure is a platform contract floor, not a Cody per-seat price and not by itself proof of Cody entitlement. Confirm current terms with Sourcegraph before purchase. |
| Limitations | You supply the model access yourself, and results depend heavily on the capability of the model you connect. | Cody requires Sourcegraph to function: it retrieves context through Sourcegraph code search and acts as a proxy to the language-model provider. Individual Free and Pro plans ended July 23, 2025, and Enterprise Starter no longer includes Cody; Cody Enterprise is the remaining Cody offering. This review has not confirmed a standalone Cody per-seat price or that a platform contract alone guarantees Cody entitlement; confirm entitlement with Sourcegraph before budgeting. |
Use the same input
Give a 60-person team cross-repo architecture answers ('where is this API consumed') within the tool's normal pricing.What a successful result must preserve
Codebase-context scale versus cost model — with the honest caveat that Cody here means Sourcegraph Cody, now enterprise-only.
Evidence and test status
Pricing and feature comparison based on official pages: Aider model-connection documentation and the Apache License 2.0 text at a pinned commit, Sourcegraph's June 25, 2025 plan-change announcement, and the current Sourcegraph Enterprise pricing page. We did not run a scored comparison. The comparison's Sources list links the Sourcegraph plan-change announcement, current platform pricing, Cody FAQ, and Cody product documentation directly.
- Aider — Aider - AI Pair Programming in Your Terminal ↗, Aider Documentation | aider ↗, Voice-to-code with aider | aider ↗, Aider - AI Pair Programming in Your Terminal ↗, Aider - AI Pair Programming in Your Terminal ↗
- Sourcegraph Cody — Sourcegraph plan-change announcement (June 25, 2025) ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-31), Sourcegraph current platform pricing ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-31), Sourcegraph Cody FAQ ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-31), Sourcegraph Cody product documentation ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-31)