Last updated: May 2026
Amazon Q Developer is AWS's AI coding assistant. It provides code completions, chat, agentic coding, security scanning, and cloud infrastructure assistance — all with deep AWS integration. It was previously known as Amazon CodeWhisperer before being folded into the broader Amazon Q product family. If you used CodeWhisperer, your existing setup migrated to Q Developer automatically.
Yes. Amazon Q Developer has a genuine free tier with no time limit:
| Plan | Price | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 agentic requests/month, basic completions, license reviews |
| Pro | $19/user/month | Higher limits, admin controls, organizational policies |
The free tier is more generous than GitHub Copilot's free plan for developers who primarily work with AWS services. It is unlimited for basic inline completions; the 50-request cap applies only to agentic tasks.
Three things set it apart:
AWS-native intelligence. Q Developer is trained on AWS documentation, APIs, and service patterns. When you ask it to write Lambda functions, CloudFormation templates, or IAM policies, it understands the context better than a general-purpose model.
Code transformation. Q Developer can automatically migrate Java 8 or Java 11 codebases to Java 17 or 21 — handling dependency updates, deprecated API replacements, and test adjustments. This is a significant enterprise feature with no equivalent in Cursor or Copilot.
Security scanning. Built-in vulnerability detection scans your code against a complete database and suggests inline fixes. Security is a first-class feature, not an add-on.
VS Code, all JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm, GoLand, etc.), Visual Studio, and the AWS Console as a chat widget. It also has a CLI for terminal use. IDE support is comparable to GitHub Copilot.
For general-purpose coding, GitHub Copilot's autocomplete is faster and more context-aware. For AWS-specific work, Q Developer's specialized training produces better results — particularly for cloud infrastructure code, IAM policy writing, and AWS service integration.
On price, both are $19/user/month at the team level. Q Developer's free tier is more useful for AWS developers than Copilot's free tier. Copilot has the edge in IDE ecosystem breadth and general completions quality.
The honest summary: if your team spends most of its time in AWS, Q Developer adds value Copilot cannot. If your team writes general backend, frontend, or cross-cloud code, Copilot or Cursor will serve you better.
No. AWS explicitly states that code processed by Q Developer is not used to train models. This applies to both the free and Pro tiers. For teams with IP concerns, this policy is similar to GitHub Copilot's paid tier protections.
Yes. Q Developer supports 15+ programming languages and works on any codebase, not just AWS projects. However, its intelligence advantage is most pronounced in AWS-specific contexts. For non-AWS projects, tools like Copilot or Cursor often provide better completions.
Q Developer includes built-in vulnerability scanning for common security issues, license conflict detection (flagging code that matches open-source with restrictive licenses), and organizational controls on the Pro tier for enforcing coding policies. For enterprise compliance, Q Developer Pro integrates with AWS's broader security and audit tooling.