Amp vs Aider
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Amp and Aider.
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Verdict: Aider wins
Aider scores 4.4/5, edging out Amp at 3.8/5. Developers who want an open-source, bring-your-own-key coding agent working in a local git repo, with full control over model and cost.
Amp AI coding agent by Anthropic alumni | Aider AI pair programming in your terminal | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 3.8 (1 review) | 4.4 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | free |
| Starting Price | Free tier available | Free |
| Best For | Senior, terminal-comfortable developers who want unattended agents on remote machines and are happy to fund them with linked subscriptions and their own keys. | Developers who want an open-source, bring-your-own-key coding agent working in a local git repo, with full control over model and cost. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | free tierbyok | open sourcebyokfree tier |
| Visit Amp → | Visit Aider → |
Amp
Pros
- + Orb workflow is real: I dispatched an environment-setup and test-green task to a remote orb, closed the laptop, and resumed from another machine with the work done
- + No Amp token fees or limits — BYOK and linked ChatGPT/Claude/X subscriptions run at subscription cost, and self-hosted orbs and own runners are free on every tier
- + Teams workspaces add SSO (SAML/OIDC), shared billing, pooled credits and shared BYOK routing at no extra seat charge
- + Transparent per-action economics: credits at provider API prices with no markup for individuals, published tier allowances (45,000 minutes on Megawatt), and clearly stated orb sizes
- + Genuinely unattended parallelism — agents in separate orbs with their own repo clones and tooling, so no worktree juggling or port conflicts in my runs
Cons
- - Orb minutes burn while agents idle: a slow install consumed my allowance at the same per-minute rate as active work, and I found no per-workload spend cap
- - Hobby has no included orb time or agent usage — 'free' means your tokens and your own machines
- - Custom endpoint URLs and gateway routing (OpenRouter, Bedrock, Azure Foundry) are early access for paid tiers behind an experimental flag, with no public rollout date
- - Homegrown vocabulary (orbs, portals, the Dial) and a terminal-first surface make onboarding deliberately steep for GUI-oriented developers
- - Amp's published 60–65% average usage discount is a vendor claim without a stated basis; included usage does not roll over month to month
Aider
Pros
- + Free and Apache-2.0 — in my cost tracking a 40-prompt Sonnet session cost about the price of a coffee in API tokens
- + Repository map handled a 7-caller rename in one pass on a 100k-line codebase, beating a paid agent that needed two rounds
- + BYOK with local-model support via Ollama: I completed a refactor fully offline with no code leaving the machine
- + Every change is an auto-committed git commit with a generated message, making each AI step individually revertable
Cons
- - No GUI, no hosted workspace, no preview — terminal comfort is a hard prerequisite
- - No team or enterprise layer: no SSO, audit logs, shared config server or vendor support contract
- - Auto-commits fragment history unless you configure around them
- - Unbounded API spend: heavy all-day use can cost more than a flat-rate subscription tool
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Amp or Aider?▼
Aider scores higher at 4.4/5 vs 3.8/5 for Amp, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Amp and Aider?▼
Amp: Amp is a coding agent and development environment from Sourcegraph that runs unattended tasks in the cloud or locally through a CLI. Aider: Aider is an open-source command-line AI pair programmer that edits code in a local git repository and commits its own changes.
Is Amp or Aider more affordable?▼
Amp starts at €0/mo, Aider starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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