DSL Pilot: A battle between GitHub Copilot and Codeium

At the end of September, we started the DSL GitHub Copilot pilot to test whether it would be a valuable addition for you. During the pilot, we received more and more suggestions to try Codeium. So, of course, we added it to the test. Both promise to revolutionise how developers write code. Do they live up to that promise? Let’s compare Copilot and Codeium.

GitHub Copilot: Your AI pair programmer
GitHub Copilot, developed by GitHub in collaboration with OpenAI, is designed to support developers with AI-powered code completions and documentation assistance.

The test
During our GitHub Copilot pilot, we noticed a significant increase in productivity. Our DSL testers mainly used it to write documentation and autocomplete code. It also has a built-in chat feature for asking questions, much like ChatGPT. Handy!

The downside? The quality of the generated code isn’t perfect and still needs careful review. Copilot is less effective with more complex code in particular.

Overall, we found that you can work faster, leaving more time for the more complex challenges. That’s a good result.

Codeium Enterprise: A Worthy Competitor
In parallel, we tested Codeium, a similar tool developed by a team at Exafunction. They aim to offer their code assistant at the lowest possible price and also provide a free version. We tested the Enterprise version.

The test:
This code assistant proved just as effective at providing the features we wanted. What stood out was that Codeium is not only cheaper than GitHub Copilot but also offers additional features: a refactoring feature to restructure and improve your code, making it easier to read, and better monitoring. With Codeium, we can see exactly how much the team uses it and how much time it saves.

We have summarised our findings from the battle between Copilot and Codeium for you. Conclusion
Both GitHub Copilot and Codeium have proved valuable additions for any developer. Copilot excels at supporting documentation tasks and automatically completing code, while Codeium offers similar features at a lower cost, along with better monitoring tools. For this reason, we have decided to integrate Codeium, after carrying out the necessary privacy and security checks. An extra tip: you can also install Codeium as a Chrome extension to use it in Databricks, Google Colab and Jupyter notebooks. Questions? Get in touch with us
Younes Seghrouchni
020-3031414