Zed vs Antigravity: what developers actually say
Based on 758 opinions on Hacker News from developers who discussed these two, most of them first-hand users.
Zed comes out ahead in this data. It has 59% approval against Antigravity's 45%, and 57% against 42% over the last 90 days. Zed's UX mentions run 119 positive to 56 negative, and speed 62 to 16. Antigravity's negatives cluster on reliability (57 negative to 16 positive) and usage limits (31 negative to 18 positive), so it is the better pick mainly when Google's Gemini harness and multi-agent workflow matter more than stable daily editing. The explicit preference count is 1 to 0 for Zed, which is too small to carry much weight.
When developers explicitly said they prefer one or switched: 1 picked Zed, 0 picked Antigravity.
Choose Zed if
- Want a fast editor with strong UX scores
- Want reliability mentions that lean positive
- Prefer a local editor that also runs agents
Choose Antigravity if
- Want Gemini models through Google's harness
- Already pay for a Google subscription
- Can absorb quota and reliability problems
Where each one wins and loses
Why developers switched
Picked Zed
Picked Antigravity
No explicit switches recorded.
Summaries are paraphrased. Each links to the original comment.