Continue vs Emdash (2026)

Pros

• 100% open-source — no vendor lock-in, fully auditable
• Most flexible model support of any major coding assistant
• Source-controlled AI configuration treats prompts like code
• Strong on-prem / air-gapped story for enterprise
• Active Hub marketplace and community contributions

Cons

• Setup is more involved than turn-key tools like Copilot or Cursor
• UX is functional rather than polished compared to Cursor
• Quality bound to your chosen model — no built-in agent intelligence
• Smaller out-of-the-box integration set than incumbents

Pros

• Fully open source (MIT) with zero cost and no vendor lock-in — 2,900+ stars and 220K+ downloads
• True multi-agent parallelism with Git worktree isolation preventing conflicts between agents
• Provider agnostic supporting 23+ coding agent CLIs from all major providers
• End-to-end workflow from issue tracker to PR merge including diff review and CI/CD checks
• Remote SSH support enabling use with cloud dev environments and powerful remote hardware

Cons