Actually, GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer don’t seem that different. Both tools use artificial intelligence to speed up software development processes. Moreover, both are owned and integrated into the ecosystems of major tech companies – Microsoft in the case of Copilot and Amazon in the case of CodeWhisperer – making them different from AI-powered development tools owned by startups like Tabnine rather than tech giants, ITPro Today writes.

Except when you pay attention to the details, you’ll find that Copilot and CodeWhisperer work a little differently. They also focus on different sets of use cases, which is the most important distinction between them.

GitHub Copilot vs Amazon CodeWhisperer: Key Similarities
Functionally, Copilot and CodeWhisperer are quite similar. They address the same needs and developers can use them in the same ways. With both tools, you basically just describe what you want your code to do, then let the AI models automatically suggest the code you need to do it.

Copilot and CodeWhisperer are also similar in that they are both cloud-based solutions offered by major technology providers.

A third similarity is that neither tool claims it can write entire software programs on its own – at least for now. Both Copilot and CodeWhisperer limit themselves to helping developers complete relatively small segments of code based on the context they provide.

Major Differences
However, when you drill down into the specific use cases for each tool, you’ll notice some important differences between GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer.
The biggest difference is that Copilot is designed to be more of a general-purpose AI-powered development tool, while CodeWhisperer is primarily intended for development use cases related to Amazon platforms, such as Amazon Web Services.

Still, when it comes to writing code related to Amazon technologies, CodeWhisperer typically does a better job than Copilot.

Another important difference between Copilot and CodeWhisperer is that CodeWhisperer supports many fewer programming languages and IDEs. Currently, it’s compatible with just C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript as programming languages, and most of the IDEs it supports are Amazon-based ones (JetBrains and Visual Studio Code are the exceptions).

Copilot can generate code in virtually any language. And although GitHub says it’s “optimized” only for certain languages, the list of such languages — which include Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, C#, and C++ — is longer than the list of languages that CodeWhisperer supports. Copilot also supports almost all of the major IDEs.