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:
- Code privacy: Privacy controls offered by each solution
- Open source compliance: Each company’s practices regarding the code that the AI models are trained on
- Ability to train AI models on private code: The code that the AI models can be trained on
- Centralized configuration: The type of centralized configuration and management offered to customers
- Price: Price point for each user in the organization
- User management: The types of user management available
- Payment methods: The methods of payment available
Table comparison of Tabnine Enterprise vs. Copilot Business
| 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 |
Drilling down further into Tabnine Enterprise vs. Copilot Business
Let’s take a closer look at the parameters and how each solution compares.
Code privacy
Tabnine Enterprise offers full privacy for its customers’ code:
- Customer code and training data are never sent to Tabnine
- Tabnine’s general AI models are never trained on customer code
- Tabnine Enterprise customers can install Tabnine Enterprise on a VPC or on-premise
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.
Open source regulation
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.
Ability to train AI models on private code
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.
Centralized configuration
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:
- Configure the platform for your org’s security and privacy requirements
- Connect AI models to different repos for different teams
- Manage access roles and permissions
- Advanced reporting to monitor usage
- Manage subscriptions
Copilot Business’s centralized configuration allows customers to:
- Manage access roles and permissions
- Filter out code suggestions that closely match public code on GitHub
Price
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.
User management
Both companies allow enterprise customers to configure and manage user roles and permissions.
Tabnine — the AI coding assistant that you control
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:
- Does the AI coding assistant offer a comprehensive platform with in-line code completions and support via chat?
- Does the vendor support the full variety of IDEs and languages your team currently utilizes?
- Does the AI coding assistant leverage world-class models? Are they able to evolve their models as the technology improves?
- Can the AI platform be optimized for your engineering team with tailored models and context-awareness?
- Does the vendor offer complete privacy for your codebase and data around usage? Do they offer air-gapped deployments (on-premise or VPC) and/or guaranteed zero data retention?
- Was the AI coding assistant trained exclusively on code with permissive licenses? Does the vendor offer protection from legal risk by limiting the recommendations to software you have the rights to and not just promises of indemnification?
- Can the vendor you are choosing meet your company’s expectations for security and compliance?
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.
Unlike generic coding assistants, Tabnine is the AI that you control:
Tabnine ensures the privacy of your code and your engineering team’s activities. Tabnine lives where and how you want it to — deployed as protected SaaS for convenience, on-premises for you to lock down the environment, or on Virtual Private Cloud for the balance of the two. Tabnine guarantees zero data retention, and we never use your code, data, or behaviors to feed our general models.
Personalized
Tabnine is personalized to your team for optimal impact on your business. Tabnine is built on best of breed large language models (with the flexibility to switch as new models emerge or improve), while giving you the ability to fine tune or deploy fully customized models. Tabnine is context-aware of your code and patterns, delivering recommendations based on your internal standards and engineering practices.
Tabnine works the way you want, in the tools you use. Tabnine supports a wide scope of IDEs and languages, improving and adding more all the time. Tabnine also provides engineering managers with visibility into how AI is used in their software development process and the impacts it is having on team performance.
Secured
Tabnine is secure and trusted. Tabnine believes in building trust through Algorithmic transparency, and thus shares how our models are built and trained with our customers. Furthermore, we are relentlessly focused on protecting our customers interests by only training on code with permissive licenses and only returning code recommendations that will not be subject to future questions of ownership and potential litigation. We respect open source code authors and their rights as well as the rights of each and every one of our customers.
As you should expect from any vendor, Tabnine offers proven, enterprise-grade security and meets key industry standards.
Get started with Tabnine for free today, or contact us to learn how we can help your engineering team be happier and more productive.
