flagship report

The state of AI developer tools

The whole catalog in one read: what is open source, what it costs, which categories are crowded, what developers actually run, and what has already shut down. The default view is the latest frozen monthly edition; add ?live=1 for current records.

Edition October 2026 · computed Oct 1, 2026

1,301

active tools tracked

Open source: 70.5%; 917 of 1,301 active tools
Categories: 38; active category pages
Published reviews: 414; editorial reviews on live tools
Shut down: 33; tools that no longer ship

licensing

How much of this you can read the source of

Open source here is the licensing fact recorded on the tool, not an inference from how it is sold — plenty of open-source tools still charge for a hosted plan. Source-available licenses are counted with the other non-open-source tools.

Open source917 tools
Proprietary384 tools

70.5% of active tools are open source. Open source vs paid breaks that down by category and pricing model, and puts a price on what the open-source ones still charge.

pricing

What the catalog costs to enter

Each tool is placed by its cheapest plan with a real monthly cost. A tool whose only comparable tier is $0 sits in the Free band rather than dragging the paid bands toward zero.

Free827 tools
$1–995 tools
$10–19130 tools
$20–49161 tools
$50–9936 tools
$100+52 tools

The median priced tool asks $20/mo to get started, across 474 tools with a comparable monthly figure. Another 827 active tools have no comparable monthly price at all — free products, pure usage-metered billing, and quote-only enterprise tiers.

the most expensive categories

Where the entry price is highest

Median entry price per category, highest first. This is what it costs to start using a typical tool in the category, not what a full team deployment ends up billing.

shutdowns

The tools that did not make it

A catalog that only tracks live tools flatters the category. These records stay published with their dates and, where one exists, the tool that took over.

33 tracked tools have shut down — 2.5% of every record in the catalog. 33 of them left an active replacement behind; the rest simply stopped.

What shut down, and what replaced it has the year-by-year breakdown and the most recent closures with dates.

what developers run

The stacks people actually publish

Counted by distinct developer rather than by mention, so a tool listed twice in one stack is still one adopter.

Across 17 developers with a published stack. The most stacked developer tools carries the full ranking.

quality

What the scored subset looks like

Scores come from a published editorial rubric, not from benchmark runs, and each one carries an evidence status describing how much of its testing record actually exists.

Scored tools

406

Verified evidence

Average overall

83.7

Scores compared across the rubric splits those averages by axis and shows the verified-only subset next to them.

How this was computed

Every number here is recomputed from the live catalog when the page is requested — nothing is frozen at publication. Two readings a month apart will legitimately differ.
Discontinued tools are excluded from the active counts, the licensing split and the pricing distribution. They are counted only in the shutdown figures.
Prices are the cheapest plan with a real monthly USD cost. Non-USD plans, usage-metered billing, one-time purchases and quote-only tiers have no monthly equivalent and are excluded rather than converted.
Community figures count distinct developers with a published stack, not stack rows, and drop entries pointing at discontinued tools.
This is a live evergreen URL, not a dated edition. There is no annual archive to compare against; the recomputation stamp below is the only date that applies to these numbers.

Recomputed October 1, 2026 · scoring rubric & evidence rules · open dataset (CC-BY 4.0)

keep reading

Open source vs paid developer toolsThe open-source share of the catalog, by category and pricing model — including what open-source tools charge for their hosted plans.Which tools changed pricing recently?Every recorded price move, newest first: which plan changed, from what, to what.What shut down, and what replaced itShutdowns by year and category, and how often a dead tool actually left a replacement behind.