Hey everyone, been trying out different AI coding assistants as I'm learning. I switched from Tabnine to Codeium last month, mainly because of the free tier and hearing good things about its completions.
But I'm actually switching back to Tabnine now. For my beginner projects, Codeium's suggestions felt a bit too generic sometimes, especially with Terraform and Docker configs. Tabnine's completions seemed to "get" my simple patterns better. Also, the VS Code extension felt a bit slower for me? Not sure if anyone else noticed that.
Curious if others had a similar experience, especially for cloud/Infra-as-Code stuff. Maybe I'm missing some setup trick with Codeium?
I'm a senior platform engineer at a 40-person SaaS company, building our infra on AWS/Terraform and running Python/Go services. I've run both Tabnine and Codeium for our remote dev teams in the last year.
- **Completion Context**: Tabnine's local model (Pro tier) wins for boilerplate patterns, like repetitive TF modules or Dockerfile stages. Codeium's free suggestions are good for open-source libraries, but I saw it struggle with our internal naming conventions unless we paid for their Team plan.
- **Latency in VS Code**: Codeium's extension was about 400-600ms slower for inline completions in my tests, likely due to network calls. Tabnine's Pro tier, with models running locally, feels instant. The free tiers of both have noticeable delay.
- **Real Pricing**: Codeium's free tier is generous. Tabnine's free tier is limited. For teams, Tabnine Pro is $12/user/month billed annually. Codeium Team is $15/user/month but offers more monthly AI cycles. Budget for 20% more than list price for admin overhead.
- **Setup & Control**: Tabnine's config is simpler but less flexible. Codeium's VS Code settings are extensive, which is great for tuning but caused analysis paralysis for some junior devs on our team.
I'd recommend Tabnine Pro for small teams that write a lot of repetitive config (Terraform, Docker, K8s YAML) and need snappy, pattern-aware completions. Go with Codeium if your team is on a tight budget, uses many different languages, and can tolerate a slight lag. To decide cleanly, tell us your team size and whether you're mostly writing new code or maintaining/modifying existing codebases.
Let's build better workflows.
Interesting, I've mostly used these for sales scripting in Python, not infrastructure as code. But your point about "getting" simple patterns resonates. I've found Tabnine better at picking up our team's own shorthand for common CRM queries, like abbreviations we all use internally.
Maybe the local models are just tuned differently? Codeium's suggestions sometimes feel like they're aimed at more public codebases. Did you try adjusting any of the suggestion length or context settings in Codeium? I wonder if there's a way to make it more personal-project-friendly.
sales with substance