Tabnine vs. Google Gemini Code Assist 

Tabnine and Google Gemini Code Assist are AI code assistants. Both products offer AI-powered chat and code completions to accelerate the software development life cycle and support common use cases such as planning (i.e., asking general coding questions or better understanding code in an existing project), code generation, explaining code, creating tests, fixing code, creating documentation, and maintaining code.

However, Tabnine offers significant advantages over Gemini Code Assist. Unlike Gemini Code Assist, Tabnine gives users the utmost control over its AI code assistant by allowing them to personalize the AI to their systems, and set the privacy and protection trade-offs that fit their security and compliance policies:

• You can control the deployment location. Use Tabnine as a secure SaaS offering (in a multitenant or single-tenant environment) or do a fully private installation (on-premises or on VPC) to ensure that your code stays in the boundaries of your corporate network and isn’t shared with any external party. 
• Eliminate worry about IP infringement with the option to use license-compliant models that can also be deployed in fully air-gapped environments. 
• Tabnine includes industry-standard compliance (GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO 9001). 
• Get highly personalized recommendations — you control what data Tabnine uses to add context from your environment.
• You can use new state-of-the-art LLMs with Tabnine Chat. Tabnine admins have full control over choosing specific models and they can also connect Tabnine to an LLM endpoint inside their corporate network if needed. 
• Tabnine integrates with all the popular IDEs and supports more than 80 programming languages and frameworks so that you can utilize Tabnine within your existing workflows.
• Tabnine includes more buying options: a Free tier, a Pro tier for small teams and individuals, and an Enterprise tier. 

This blog post goes through each of the differences between these products in detail, demonstrating why we believe that Tabnine is the ideal choice for enterprises and individual developers. 

Protection from IP issues

Gemini Code Assist is powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro, which is trained on a large codebase of publicly available code, Google Cloud-specific material, and Stack Overflow posts. This training data may include copyrighted code, so it’s possible for Gemini Code Assist to generate code that matches publicly available code. If a code suggestion matches proprietary code, there’s a risk that using that suggestion could trigger claims of copyright infringement. To mitigate this legal risk, Google offers an IP indemnification policy to protect Gemini Code Assist-licensed users from potential legal ramifications concerning copyright infringements.

Tabnine eliminates concerns around IP infringement from the get-go. We’ve trained our proprietary models (Tabnine Protected for Chat, and the universal model for code completion) exclusively on permissively licensed code. This ensures that the recommendations from Tabnine never match any proprietary code and removes any concerns around legal risks associated with accepting the code suggestions. Unlike Gemini Code Assist, we’re transparent about the data used to train our proprietary model and share it with customers under NDA. Additionally, we offer an IP indemnification to enterprise users for peace of mind. 

Data privacy

Gemini Code Assist is offered only as a SaaS product. This is often a deal breaker for privacy-conscious enterprises, especially in highly regulated environments such as financial services, healthcare, defense, semiconductor, and automotive, as these companies need an air-gapped deployment. 

Tabnine offers its customers numerous deployment options. Customers can consume Tabnine as a secure SaaS offering (in a multitenant environment or a single-tenant environment) or do a fully private installation (on-premises or on VPC) to ensure that their code stays in the boundaries of their corporate network and isn’t shared with any external party. 

Security and compliance

GDPR, one of the strictest data privacy laws in the world, is a must-have for AI code assistants as it shows the company’s strong commitment toward data protection and privacy. Gemini Code Assist is not GDPR compliant, making it difficult for companies based in the EU or global companies that have customers in the EU to use Gemini Code Assist. 

Gemini Code Assist also lacks ISO 9001 compliance, a globally recognized standard for quality management that demonstrates a company’s commitment to maintaining high quality, meeting customer expectations, and improving performance. 

Tabnine offers key compliances like SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and ISO 9001 to ensure the security and privacy of your data. 

Personalization 

In AI, context is everything. To increase the effectiveness of AI code assistants, it’s imperative to provide contextual awareness to the LLMs so that they can understand the subtle nuances that make a developer and organization unique. 

Gemini Code Assist gains context by leveraging the locally available information in the developer’s IDE. Additionally, enterprises can customize Gemini Code Assist using their organization’s private codebases and knowledge sources so that Gemini Code Assist can offer more tailored assistance (this capability is currently in preview).

Tabnine leverages locally available data in the developer’s IDE to provide more accurate and relevant results. This includes runtime errors, imported libraries, other open files, current files, compile/syntax errors, noncode sources of information, current selected code, connected repositories, conversation history, Git history, project metadata, and other project files. We’ve seen that personalized AI recommendations based on awareness of a developer’s IDE are accepted 40% more often than AI suggestions generated without these integrations.

Additionally, users can connect Tabnine to their organization code repos (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket) to gain global context. Tabnine also offers model customization — you can fine-tune our proprietary model using your own code to create a custom model. Model customization is extremely valuable when you have code in a bespoke programming language or a language that’s underrepresented in the training data set, such as System Verilog. 

Ability to support new models 

Gemini Code Assist is powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro. Since Gemini 1.5 Pro is the only model available, it prevents users from leveraging the new and powerful models that become available.  

Tabnine currently offers users 8 different model choices for Tabnine Chat: two custom-built fully private models from Tabnine, plus Open AI’s GPT-4o, GPT-4.0 Turbo, GPT-3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet model, Cohere’s Command R model, and Codestral, Mistral’s first-ever code model. This flexibility enables users to pick the right model based on their use case or a project. For projects where data privacy and legal risks are less important, you can use a model optimized for performance over compliance. As you switch to working on projects that have stricter requirements for privacy and protection, you can change to a model like Tabnine Protected that’s built for that purpose. 

Enterprises have complete control when selecting models that power Tabnine Chat. Tabnine admins can choose any specific models from the list of available LLMs and make them available to their teams. They can also connect Tabnine to an LLM endpoint inside their corporate network if needed. 

Many new, powerful LLMs were released in the first half of 2024 alone: OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3 models, and Cohere’s Command R+ model to name a few. At Tabnine, we’re committed to adding support for new, state-of-the-art LLMs as they become available. This prevents LLM lock in, future-proofs your AI strategy, and enables you to take advantage of all the innovation happening in this space. 

Wider support for IDEs
Tabnine offers a much robust coverage for IDEs as compared to Google Gemini Code Assist. 

Support for more programming languages

Tabnine supports more than 80 programming languages and frameworks, including JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, Go, and more, whereas Gemini Code Assist supports just 20 programming languages. 

Pricing

Gemini Code Assist costs $19 per user per month with a 12-month commitment. It’s free to try until mid-July, but there’s no free tier that allows users to use Gemini Code Assist for free perpetually. 

Tabnine offers a Free tier, a Pro tier (which is ideal for individuals and small teams and costs $12 per user per month and comes with a 90-day free trial), and an Enterprise tier ($39 per user per month). This provides users more flexibility when it comes to using Tabnine. 

The table below summarizes the differences between Tabnine and Gemini Code Assist.  Both products support common use cases such as code generation, creating documentation, generating tests, and more. However, if you need an AI code assistant that gives you complete control over deployment options, personalization, protection from IP infringement issues, freedom to choose the right LLM for your use case, wider support for IDEs and programming languages, industry-standard compliance, and more buying options, then you should consider Tabnine. 

Tabnine: A market leader in the AI code assistant category

Tabnine is the originator of the AI code assistant category and we introduced our first AI-based code completion tool for Java in the IDE in June 2018. Tabnine is now the leading AI code assistant on the market with one million monthly active users. This enables us to gather feedback from a vast number of users and make continuous improvements and refinements to the product. In addition to purchasing Tabnine directly from us, you can also purchase Tabnine from the Google Cloud Marketplace.

Tabnine’s position as a leader in this space was recently reinforced as we were featured as a Luminary in Everest Group’s Innovation Watch Assessment for Generative AI Applications in Software Development. Everest Group — a world-renowned research firm that provides strategic insights on IT, business processes, and engineering services — assessed 14 leading providers of generative AI solutions for software development for this report. The assessment framework evaluated each provider on four criteria (Scale, Level of Maturity, Partnerships, and Investments), and segmented them into four categories: Luminaries, Fast Followers, Influencers, and Seekers. Tabnine performed exceptionally well in the entire assessment framework and is recognized as a Luminary. Google, on the other hand, is categorized as a Fast Follower. 

To learn more about Tabnine, check out our Docs or contact us to schedule a demo with a product expert. If you want to try it out for yourself today, sign up here to try it free for 90 days.