Best alternatives to Continue in 2026

Most AI coding assistants bundle the AI model and the editor plugin together, so you're stuck with whatever model the vendor picked and however they price it. Continue takes a different approach: it's an open-source layer you install into your existing editor (VS Code or JetBrains) that connects to the AI model of your choice, giving you AI-assisted code completion, chat and edits while keeping you in control of the underlying model and your code. Continue was built as a fully open-source, configurable coding agent, and the project was acquired by Cursor; its GitHub repository (35k+ stars) remains public but is now archived/read-only, with the final release at v2.0.0 and its docs and pricing pages returning 404. The extension itself still installs and works today for developers already using it, but active development and support have effectively stopped.