Who maintains Zed and how active is it?

Zed is maintained by Zed Industries, Inc. on GitHub (87,424 stars at indexing time). LLM Explorer tracks its star count, fork count, last commit, and license over time.

Is Zed open source and what is its license?

Zed is published under the GPL-3.0-or-later license. Check the linked repository on this page for current terms before integrating.

Zed

Name: Zed
Author: Zed Industries, Inc.

» AI Agents » Ready-to-Use » Zed URL Share on

Repository 87,424 9,671

High-performance, multiplayer code editor with a native Agent Panel that connects to any Agent Client Protocol (ACP)-compatible coding agent

code-editor agent-panel acp rust multiplayer mcp ide

TypeReady-to-Use

HostingHybrid

MaturityMature

Status Maintained

Website Repository Docs

Key Features

Single Agent Human-in-the-Loop Streaming Async Support Type Safe Short-Term Memory Shared Memory Plugin System MCP Protocol Code Execution File System Access CLI Self-Hosted

Community Feedback

Strengths

Very fast, GPU-accelerated native editor
Created and champions the open ACP standard, now adopted by JetBrains and multiple agent vendors
Free to run any external ACP agent with no Zed markup
Real-time multiplayer collaborative editing

Weaknesses

Own hosted-model pricing/limits reported inconsistently across sources
AI feature set younger/less mature than dedicated CLI agents
GPL-3.0 licensing may deter some commercial forks/derivatives

Zed Details

Organization	Zed Industries, Inc.
Organization Type	Company
Funding	Series b+
Category	Ready-to-Use
Subcategory	Code generation
Deployment	Hybrid
Primary Language	Rust
Runtime	macOS, Linux, Windows
License	GPL-3.0-or-later
Commercial Use	Copyleft
Install Command	`curl -f https://zed.dev/install.sh \| sh`
GitHub Stars	87,424
GitHub Forks	9,671
Open Issues	3,331
Contributors	482
Last Commit	2026-07-23
First Release	2022-12-01
Release Cadence	Near-daily (frequent point releases)
Maturity	Mature
Pricing Model	Freemium
Free Tier	Editor is free and open source; free tier includes a limited number of Zed-hosted-model prompts per month plus unlimited use of bring-your-own-key or external ACP agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex CLI) at no extra charge from Zed
Self-Hosted Free	Yes
Cost Model	free editor; freemium for Zed-hosted AI models; ACP external agents billed by their own providers
Community Size	Very large (87K+ stars, 482 contributors)
Community Activity	Very active
Sentiment	Positive
GPU Required	No
Research Date	2026-07-23
LLM Providers	Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Amazon Bedrock, OpenAI, Local models via Ollama, Any ACP-compatible external agent (Claude Code, Codex CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Devin, etc.)
API Keys Required	Provider API key (Anthropic/Google/OpenAI/etc.) or a Zed account for Zed-hosted models — none required for local-only editing

Use Cases

In-editor agentic coding via the Agent Panel (cmd-?/ctrl-?)
Running any ACP-compatible external agent inside the editor with live diffs
Real-time multiplayer/collaborative editing
Zed-hosted-model completions and inline edit predictions

When to Use

Best for: Developers who want a fast native editor plus the freedom to plug in any ACP-compatible coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, etc.)

Avoid when: You need a mature, long-established plugin/extension ecosystem comparable to VS Code

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Release v20260328a

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