UPDATED: Supported AI models in GitHub Copilot - GitHub Docs
Which model to use with GitHub Copilot (and when)
Announcement & FAQ: Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual Plans
Do you actually feel a difference between GitHub Copilot models vs using LLMs directly (Claude, Gemini, GPT, etc.)?
What is GitHub Copilot?
GitHub Copilot transforms the developer experience. Backed by the leaders in AI, GitHub Copilot provides contextualized assistance throughout the software development lifecycle, from inline suggestions and chat assistance in the IDE to code explanations and answers to docs in GitHub and more. With GitHub Copilot elevating their workflow, developers can focus on: value, innovation, and happiness.
GitHub Copilot enables developers to focus more energy on problem solving and collaboration and spend less effort on the mundane and boilerplate. That’s why developers who use GitHub Copilot report up to 75% higher satisfaction with their jobs than those who don’t and are up to 55% more productive at writing code without sacrifice to quality, which all adds up to engaged developers shipping great software faster.
GitHub Copilot integrates with leading editors, including Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, and Neovim, and, unlike other AI coding assistants, is natively built into GitHub. Growing to millions of individual users and tens of thousands of business customers, GitHub Copilot is the world’s most widely adopted AI developer tool and the competitive advantage developers ask for by name.
What are the differences between the GitHub Copilot Business, GitHub Copilot Enterprise, and GitHub Copilot Individual plans?
GitHub Copilot has multiple offerings for organizations and an offering for individual developers. All the offerings include both inline suggestion and chat assistance. The primary differences between the organization offerings and the individual offering are license management, policy management, and IP indemnity.
Organizations can choose between GitHub Copilot Business and GitHub Copilot Enterprise. GitHub Copilot Business primarily features GitHub Copilot in the coding environment - that is the IDE, CLI and GitHub Mobile. GitHub Copilot Enterprise includes everything in GitHub Copilot Business. It also adds an additional layer of customization for organizations and integrates into GitHub.com as a chat interface to allow developers to converse with GitHub Copilot throughout the platform. GitHub Copilot Enterprise can index an organization’s codebase for a deeper understanding of the customer’s knowledge for more tailored suggestions and will offer customers access to fine-tuned custom, private models for inline suggestions.
GitHub Copilot Individual is designed for individual developers, freelancers, students, educators, and open source maintainers. The plan includes all the features of GitHub Copilot Business except organizational license management, policy management, and IP indemnity.
How can I upgrade my GitHub Copilot Free license to Copilot Pro?
If you're on the Free plan, you can upgrade to Pro through your Copilot settings page or directly on the Copilot marketing page.
Videos
Cassidy posted about which models she likes to use here https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/github-copilot/which-ai-model-should-i-use-with-github-copilot/
I tend to use Sonnet in agent mode, and currently been using GPT4.1 a lot when in Ask mode then might change models if one of them lets me down. What are your defaults (and why)
I’m experimenting with the different AI models available in GitHub Copilot (GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.), and I’d like to hear from people who actively switch between them.
-
When you change the Copilot model (for example GPT‑4.1 ↔ Claude 4.5/Opus 4.5 ↔ Gemini 3.0), do you clearly notice differences in:
-
code quality and correctness
-
reasoning about the whole project or repo
-
speed / latency
-
how well it handles large codebases or multi-file edits?
-
-
For those who also use these models directly (ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Gemini, etc.):
-
How different do they feel compared to using the same model through Copilot inside the IDE?
-
Do you feel any “downgrade” in Copilot (shorter answers, weaker reasoning, less context, worse refactors), or is it basically the same for your workflow?
-
-
What’s your ideal setup today? For example:
-
“Copilot (Claude) for inline coding + ChatGPT for long explanations and architecture”
-
“Copilot (GPT) for small fixes + Claude/Gemini in browser for big refactors and debugging sessions”
-
or any other combo that works well for you.
-
Please include: language(s) you code in, IDE/editor, and main model you prefer and why. That kind of detail makes the answers much more useful than just “X feels better than Y”.
So I'm looking to build a front-end app from scratch using Claude in VSCode. But I'm not sure I understand how the pricing works. The Pro+ plan https://github.com/github-copilot/pro-plus lists support for Claude Opus 4 - https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/about-github-copilot/plans-for-github-copilot, but doesn't mention what are the supported rates (like how many requests in a few hours) or whether there are rate limits.
Has anyone been able to use this and can share any thoughts?