VS Code vs Zed: Which Editor Should You Use?

The editor most developers use, set against a newer one with collaboration built in. Usage trends, features, shortcuts, and a checker for what you need.

October 19, 2026 · Dev Tools · Comparison

Visual Studio Code is the editor most developers use. Zed is a newer editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter, built around speed, collaboration, and optional AI. Both are free, and both now have AI agents built in. So which one is right for you?

This guide sticks to what the two projects document themselves, plus the latest Stack Overflow developer survey. Everything was checked on 19 October 2026, and the sources are listed at the end. One thing it does not include is a speed test, and the section below explains why.

Two different bets

The editors differ in how they are built, licensed, and extended before you open a single file.

Who uses what

Every year Stack Overflow asks developers which editors they used regularly in the past year, and respondents can pick as many as they like. Here is how the answers have moved since 2022. Zed first appears in the 2025 results, so its line is short.

VS Code is still far in front: 70.9% of 2026 respondents used it, against 27.8% for the next editor. It dropped five points in a year, from 75.9%, the lowest of the five years shown. Zed rose from 7.3% to 11.4%, a gain of 4.1 points or about 56%. Cursor moved the other way, from 17.9% to 14.9%.

Read the shape of those lines, not the decimals. The survey's sample shrank from 71,010 respondents in 2022 to 13,193 in 2026, and the 2025 question began mentioning AI-enabled editors, so year-to-year changes of a point or two may be noise.

This is where the whole field sits in the 2026 survey, with VS Code and Zed picked out:

Open source, by the numbers

Both editors develop in the open on GitHub. Stars measure interest rather than use, but the repositories do show how different the two communities are in size.

Which one fits what you need?

Feature lists do not decide anything until you know what you need. Pick your must-haves and see how each editor answers, using each editor's own documentation. Where the docs did not cover something, it says so instead of guessing.

What about speed?

Zed's homepage calls it "the world's fastest IDE", and plenty of blog posts have put numbers on that. We did not run our own benchmark, and we are not going to print anyone else's multiplier either. The published figures agree on direction but not on size, because hardware, extensions, cache state, and what is being measured all change the result.

The honest way to settle it is to test on your own work:

• Open the same project in both, with the extensions you actually use.
• Watch memory in Activity Monitor (macOS) or Task Manager (Windows) after a minute of idling.
• Time how long each takes to show a window, and how each behaves with your largest file.

Speed differences matter most on big repositories and older machines, and it is on those that a ten-minute test is most worth doing.

Remote work and collaboration

Both editors can edit code on another machine while the interface stays local. In VS Code, the Remote Development extensions install VS Code Server on the target and cover SSH, Dev Containers, WSL, secure tunnels, and GitHub Codespaces. Zed runs a headless server on the remote host over SSH, supports WSL on Windows, and can open a project in a dev container from its command line. Zed's remote sessions keep its AI features working too.

Collaboration is where their designs differ most. Zed builds it in: several people can work in one project and see each other's cursors, channels provide persistent project rooms with voice chat, and shared projects give collaborators access to your local files inside that project. VS Code gets the same job done with the Live Share extension, which Zed's own migration guide points out you no longer need.

AI in each editor

VS Code's AI is built around GitHub Copilot: a chat to ask questions and direct agents, an agent loop that gathers context, edits code, runs checks and revises, and inline suggestions. You can use models from a Copilot plan, bring your own key, or connect a local model, and a free Copilot plan exists. AI can be switched off with a setting.

Zed has an Agent Panel and edit prediction, where a model predicts the code you want to write. The default model is Zeta, which Zed developed and released as open source, and you can also use GitHub Copilot, Mercury Coder, Codestral, or local models through Ollama. Zed's pricing separates the editor from the hosted AI:

Pro starts with a 14-day free trial that includes $5 of GPT-6 Luna usage and no credit card.

Moving from VS Code to Zed

If you decide to try Zed, the switch is gentler than it sounds. Zed can import your VS Code settings, during setup or later with the zed: import vs code settings command. It does not import extensions or keybindings, and it has no workspace file: opening a folder is your project, with optional per-project settings in .zed/settings.json.

Most of the muscle memory carries over. Search a shortcut you rely on, or filter to the ones that differ:

So which one?

There is no wrong answer here, and nothing stops you using both. A fair summary:

• Stay with VS Code if your work depends on specific extensions, you use Tunnels or Codespaces, or your team has standardised on it. Its extension library is the bigger of the two (Zed's own guide says it has fewer), and it is the most-used editor in the survey.
• Try Zed if you want collaboration built into the editor, an open-source licence, or AI that you can leave off. It is free, and the settings import makes a trial cheap.
• Decide on your own project. The only comparison that counts is the one run with your files, your extensions, and your habits.

If you are weighing the AI side of the choice, our guides to Claude 5.5 and Codex cover the models and costs behind the agents these editors can use.

Sources

• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026: Dev IDEs
• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, 2024, 2023, and 2022
• VS Code FAQ, remote development, and Copilot overview
• Zed documentation, including remote development, collaboration, edit prediction, extensions, and migrating from VS Code
• Zed pricing
• GitHub: microsoft/vscode and zed-industries/zed