Kiro vs Zed

Kiro is an agentic development environment for professional developers, software teams, businesses, and enterprises. Its spec-driven workflow turns prompts into requirements, designs, and tasks for agents to implement. Deterministic tools, including property-based tests, verify code correctness and its alignment with user intent. Background agent hooks can update documentation, generate unit tests, or optimise performance, while steering files let users supply project or global context, standards, and workflows. The IDE supports VS Code settings, themes, Open VSX plugins, and MCP servers for connecting agents to external services, APIs, documentation, and tools. Desktop versions run on macOS, Windows, and Linux; Kiro also has a web interface and mobile app for accessing cloud sessions from a phone. Kiro Web requires a paid subscription. The free plan includes 50 credits per month; KIRO PRO costs $20 a month billed per user and includes 1,000 credits. Kiro says it encrypts data in transit and at rest; enterprise administrators can configure customer-managed keys.

Zed is a code editor for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with Personal, Pro, and Business plans. Personal is free forever and includes 2,000 accepted edit predictions; it also allows unlimited use with API keys or external agents. Pro costs $10.00 per month, includes unlimited edit predictions and $5 of tokens, and bills usage beyond that allowance at API list price plus 10%. The Pro trial lasts 14 days or until its $5 balance is used, with no credit card required. Editing tools include extensions, multi-cursor and column editing, and macro recording; the editor also supports a built-in debugger, remote development, and language servers. Native Git operations include staging, commits, pulls, pushes, and viewing diffs. Users can chat with teammates, code together, and share screens and projects. Supported model providers include Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic, GitHub Copilot, Google AI, and OpenAI; the extension ecosystem has hundreds of extensions. Business costs $30.00 per month and has no minimum seat count. SSO, SAML, and SCIM are planned but not currently available.