Honest answer first: if you want free AI code completion inside an IDE, OpenCues is not that tool and won't pretend to be. It does no next-edit prediction and has no code-editor integration. What OpenCues is: a free, open-source assistant for all the text around your code work: prompts to AI agents, commit messages, PR descriptions, emails, and every browser field.
What free means here, precisely
OpenCues itself is free and open source: no subscription, no account, no paid tier. LLM inference runs on your own key, and the free routes are real: Cerebras' free tier serves the default gpt-oss-120b, a keyless free-pool provider exists for the blanks surface (with an explicit warning that it may train on inputs, which is why OpenCues refuses to route prose surfaces through it), and Ollama runs models fully on your machine at zero per-token cost. So a genuinely free setup exists at every level, with the trade-offs stated rather than hidden.
Where it replaces Copilot, and where it doesn't
| Job | Copilot | OpenCues |
|---|---|---|
| Code completion in the editor | Yes, its core job | No, not attempted |
| Prompts to coding agents | No | Yes: cues, rewrites, and _ fills inside Claude Code, OpenCode, and Gemini CLI prompt boxes |
| Commit messages, PR text, issues | Yes, inside its own surfaces (editor Source Control, github.com) | Yes: any text field, terminal included |
| Browser writing | No | Yes: Chrome extension |
| Live values while typing | No | Yes: volume _, nvda _, weather _ |
The interaction model is the real difference
Copilot's ghost text appears when the model decides; you accept or dismiss. With OpenCues nothing generates until you place a _ exactly where you want the response, so the only suggestions you evaluate are ones you asked for. In prose and prompts, where there is rarely one right continuation, that inversion is the difference between assistance and noise.
Run them together
The realistic setup for a developer is Copilot (or any completer) for code inside the editor, and OpenCues for everything else: the prompt you type to your coding agent, the commit message, the standup note, the reply on GitHub. They never compete for the same keystroke, and since OpenCues costs nothing to add, the combination is strictly additive. If code completion itself is the thing you want free, note that Copilot has its own free tier (about 2,000 completions a month) and editor-native options exist; that market is simply not the one OpenCues plays in.
Related: OpenCues vs Copilot · Is OpenCues free? · OpenCues vs Cursor Tab · GitHub repo