Trae

Trae is an AI-first code editor from ByteDance, positioned as a direct competitor to Cursor and Windsurf. The flagship product, Trae IDE, is a VS Code-derived desktop app with a built-in agent (SOLO mode), inline autocomplete, multi-file edits, and chat over your repo. A second offering, Trae Work, extends similar agent ergonomics into general knowledge-work tasks. The pitch is straightforward: ship faster by letting an agent plan, edit, and run tasks across your codebase rather than just suggesting next-token completions.

Pricing is aggressive for the category. The Free tier includes 5,000 autocompletions per month plus SOLO-mode access, Lite is $3/mo, Pro is $10/mo (after a 7-day trial) with $20 of basic model usage and up to 10 concurrent cloud tasks, scaling to Pro+ at $30 and Ultra at $100 for heavy users with model early access and 20 parallel cloud tasks. That undercuts Cursor's $20 Pro tier meaningfully, which is the main reason Trae has picked up traction with cost-sensitive developers.

The trade-offs are real. Trae is closed-source, owned by ByteDance, and the marketing pages are notably thin on which underlying models you actually get at each tier - expect a multi-model backend with Claude/GPT-class frontier models gated by usage credits rather than a flat subscription. There is no published public API; Trae is consumed as an IDE, not a platform. Privacy-conscious teams and enterprise buyers will want to scrutinize data handling before adopting it for proprietary code.