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Refact.ai vs Tabnine

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors. Refact.ai starts at $10, Tabnine at $39. Only Refact.ai has a free tier.

Refact.aiOpen-source AI coding agent and autocomplete that runs in your IDE, in the cloud or fully self-hostedTabnineEnterprise code assistant that can run fully air-gapped

Side by side

FactRefact.aiTabnine
CategoryAI Coding AssistantsAI Coding Assistants
Pricing modelFreemiumPaid
Starts at$10 month$39 month
Public APINoNo
PlatformsVscode ExtVscode Ext, macOS, Windows, Linux
CompanySmall Magellanic Cloud AI LtdTabnine
Launched20232013
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

Refact.ai

One of the few coding agents you can audit and run entirely on your own hardware, at a Pro price well under most rivals. The trade-off is polish: agent and completion quality trail the frontier hosted tools, and the docs subdomain currently redirects somewhere stale.

Pros

  • Open-source core with a real self-hosted path, including fine-tuning
  • Broad IDE coverage beyond the usual VS Code-only support
  • Pro at $10/month undercuts most agent subscriptions
  • Free tier suffices for light daily use

Cons

  • docs.refact.ai currently redirects to an outdated third-party GitHub wiki
  • Output quality depends heavily on which model tier you run
  • Small vendor competing against far larger, faster-moving rivals

Tabnine

If your compliance team will not let code leave the building, Tabnine is one of the few assistants that answers that requirement properly — but it has walked away from individual developers entirely, and the catalogs still listing it as freemium are two years stale.

Pros

  • Deployment options run all the way to air-gapped, which almost no competitor matches
  • Context engine connects Perforce as well as the usual Git hosts, which matters in games and hardware
  • Self-hosted models carry no token metering, so heavy use does not scale the bill

Cons

  • No free tier since April 2025 and no individual plan since October 2025
  • Entry price is $39/user/month, roughly four times Copilot Pro
  • Annual billing only, so there is no cheap way to pilot it
  • Cloud model usage is billed on top of the seat fee rather than included

Which one fits

Choose Refact.ai if you need

  • Teams whose code must stay on-prem but still want an agent and completions
  • Developers who want AI inside JetBrains, VS Code or Neovim rather than a separate AI editor
  • Tinkerers who prefer open-source AI tooling they can inspect and modify

Choose Tabnine if you need

  • Regulated teams that need on-premises or air-gapped inference
  • Organisations with a zero-code-retention requirement in procurement
  • Enterprises wanting completions tuned on their own private repositories

More comparisons

All Refact.ai alternatives →All Tabnine alternatives →Browse all AI Coding Assistants →