DSL Pilot: A showdown between GitHub Copilot and Codeium

At the end of September, we launched the DSL GitHub Copilot pilot to test whether it would be a valuable addition for you. During the pilot, we received more and more tips about Codeium. Of course, we added this tool to the test for you. Both promise to revolutionise the way developers write code. Do they deliver? We take you through a head-to-head comparison of 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 help with documentation.

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

The downside? The quality of the generated code is not perfect and still needs a 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 is 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 as cheaply as possible 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. Its refactoring feature lets you restructure and improve your code, making it easier to read. It also has better monitoring capabilities: with Codeium, we can see exactly how much the team uses it and how much time it saves.

We’ve 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, with better monitoring tools. For this reason, we’ve decided to integrate Codeium, after carrying out the necessary privacy and security checks. One more tip: you can also install Codeium as a Chrome extension to use it in Databricks, Google Colab and Jupyter notebooks. Questions? Get in touch
Younes Seghrouchni
020-3031414