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Both Tabnine and Copilot offer AI coding assistant solutions for enterprise R&D teams.
So which solution is better?
We’ve put together a comparison using the most common parameters that we’ve encountered in our own work as developers, whilst also serving the dev community for several years. From our POV, these parameters reflect the most important needs, pain points, and challenges that must be addressed by AI code assistants for enterprises:
| Parameter | Tabnine Enterprise | Copilot Business |
|---|---|---|
| Code privacy | Self Hosting - ability to install on your VPC or on-premise Your code is never sent to Tabnine, other than info needed to manage your licenses and get updates | Copilot sends snippets of your code to Microsoft’s servers Copilot uses the code collected from the inference and the interaction with user to train their model, which might lead to code being leaked to other organizations (although an opt-out option exists) |
| Open source compliance | Totally secure - Tabnine doesn’t train its AI models on code with non-permissive licenses Full transparency regarding the code that the models are trained on Provides a full list of open source libraries used to train our models, allowing users to access the attribution list and avoid potential legal issues | Partially secure - Copilot offers an option to block similar code to open source code |
| Ability to train AI models on private code | Supported Tabnine also allows the organization to choose which code the models should be trained on Connect AI models to different repos for different teams | Not supported - AI models are trained only on OpenAI |
| Centralized configuration | Supported, allowing you to configure several features and capabilities from one place, including security and privacy requirements, connecting AI models to private code repos, manage access roles and permissions, get advanced reporting on usage, and manage subscriptions | Supported, allowing you to manage access user roles and permissions, while also filtering out code suggestions that closely match public code on GitHub. |
| Price | $20 per user per month Additional cost for deployment on your VPC or on-premise | $19 per user per month However, Copilot Business is only available for companies with GitHub Enterprise, which costs $210 per user per year for the entire organization, which can add up to 100s of users. |
| User management | Supported, allowing you to manage access roles and permissions | Supported, allowing you to manage access roles and permissions |
| Payment methods | Credit card or bank transfer | Credit Card + PayPal |
Let’s take a closer look at the parameters and how each solution compares.
Tabnine Enterprise offers full privacy for its customers’ code:
On the other hand, Copilot Business sends both code snippets and user engagement data to itself. Although the code snippets aren’t saved, user engagement data is collected and used to improve Copilot’s AI models.
The code on which a solution’s AI models are trained can have a serious impact on the companies that use the solutions.
Tabnine doesn’t train (and never has trained) its AI models on code with non-permissive licenses, and offers full transparency and attribution. This means that Tabnine isn’t restricted by the GPL license’s copyleft provisions, and protects users and customers from possible related consequences. In addition, it’s always been Tabnine’s goal to honor the intent of code authors and maintain good faith with the rest of the developer community.
On the other hand, Copilot for Business trains its models on OpenAI, which could result in legal exposure for its customers. This is because OpenAI is trained on non-permissive open source, such as GPL, and doesn’t disclose its training set or provide references.
While Copilot Business is trained only on OpenAI, Tabnine Enterprise allows customers to connect Tabnine’s AI models to their own code repositories. This means the models, which are only accessible to the customer, can learn the organization’s coding best practices, styles, naming conventions, and more, resulting in code suggestions that are way more context-sensitive and relevant. In addition, this allows for faster onboarding and training of new team members and junior developers.
Both Tabnine Enterprise and Copilot Business offer central management and configuration, however, the features offered are different.
Tabnine Enterprise’s centralized configuration allows customers to:
Copilot Business’s centralized configuration allows customers to:
On the surface, the price appears to be almost the same ($20 per Tabnine Enterprise user, $19 per Copilot Business user). However, Copilot Business is only available to companies using GitHub Enterprise, which charges $210 per seat per year. In effect, that’s a barrier for enterprise companies that don’t need or want GitHub enterprise.
Both companies allow enterprise customers to configure and manage user roles and permissions.
Whether you are choosing an AI coding assistant to make your life easier as an individual developer or choosing a tool to deploy out to your entire engineering team in order to improve the effectiveness and satisfaction of your team, it’s critical to evaluate potential vendors holistically:
Only Tabnine meets all of these requirements expected by enterprise engineering teams and has the history and scale of developer adoption to prove it.
Since launching our first AI coding assistant in 2018, Tabnine has pioneered generative AI for software development. Tabnine helps development teams of every size use AI to accelerate and simplify the software development process without sacrificing privacy & security. Tabnine boosts engineering velocity, code quality, and developer happiness by automating the coding workflow through AI tools customized to your team. With more than one million monthly users, Tabnine typically automates 30-50% of code creation for each developer and has generated more than 1% of the world’s code.
Tabnine is the AI coding assistant that helps development teams of every size use AI to accelerate and simplify the software development process without sacrificing privacy, security, or compliance. Tabnine boosts engineering velocity, code quality, and developer happiness by automating the coding workflow through AI tools customized to your team. Tabnine supports more than one million developers across companies in every industry.
Unlike generic coding assistants, Tabnine is the AI that you control:
It’s private. You choose where and how to deploy Tabnine (SaaS, VPC, or on-premises) to maximize control over your intellectual property. Rest easy knowing that Tabnine never stores or shares your company’s code.
It’s personalized. Tabnine delivers an optimized experience for each development team. It’s context-aware and delivers precise and personalized recommendations for code generation, code explanations, guidance, and for test and documentation generation.
It’s protected. Tabnine is built with enterprise-grade security and compliance at its core. It’s trained exclusively on open source code with permissive licenses, ensuring that customers are never exposed to legal liability.
Tabnine provides accurate and personalized code completions for code snippets, whole lines, and full functions. Tabnine Chat in the IDE allows developers to communicate with a chat agent in natural language and get assistance with various coding tasks, such as:
Learn more about using Tabnine AI to analyze, create, and improve your code across every stage of development:
Try Tabnine for free today or contact us to learn how we can help accelerate your software development.
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