CodeWhisperer Review (2025): Amazon's AI Code Assistant

CodeWhisperer's free Individual tier provides unlimited code suggestions with no expiration date, while GitHub Copilot requires a paid subscription after a trial period (currently $10/month for individual developers). This makes CodeWhisperer significantly more accessible for solo developers, students, and hobbyists who need AI coding assistance without ongoing costs.

The quality gap between the free and paid tiers of CodeWhisperer is also less pronounced than with other tools, as the free tier includes the core suggestion engine and basic security scanning. However, GitHub Copilot still edges out CodeWhisperer in general code suggestion quality for non-AWS use cases, which may justify its subscription cost for professional developers.

Yes, CodeWhisperer includes several features specifically designed for enterprise security. The Professional tier offers an offline mode that can run completely within a company's network, eliminating the need to send code to external servers. This is particularly valuable for organizations working with sensitive or proprietary code.

Additionally, CodeWhisperer's security scanner helps identify potential vulnerabilities during development, and the administrative dashboard allows teams to enforce custom security policies across the organization. The reference tracking feature helps maintain compliance with open-source licensing requirements by identifying when suggestions resemble existing open-source code.

Amazon has also designed CodeWhisperer with data privacy in mind—your code isn't used to train the model, and the service complies with major security standards including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and FedRAMP where applicable.

CodeWhisperer officially supports 11 programming languages, but its performance varies significantly across them. In our testing, we found the strongest support for:

1. Python - Highest quality suggestions with excellent AWS SDK support
2. Java - Very good suggestion quality, particularly for AWS service integrations
3. JavaScript/TypeScript - Strong support for both client and server-side development
4. C# - Good quality suggestions, especially for AWS-related code

Languages like Go, Ruby, PHP, Rust, and Kotlin receive adequate support but with less consistent quality and fewer specialized suggestions. SQL support is primarily focused on AWS-related database operations. If you primarily work in Python, Java, or JavaScript—especially in AWS environments—you'll see the best results from CodeWhisperer.

CodeWhisperer takes a conservative approach to code privacy. According to AWS, code snippets submitted for completion suggestions are not stored beyond the time needed to generate suggestions, and are not used to train or improve the underlying models. This differs from some competitors that may collect user code (anonymized or otherwise) for model training.

For teams concerned about intellectual property, the Professional tier offers an offline mode that can function entirely within a company's network. The reference tracking feature helps address potential intellectual property issues by identifying when a suggestion closely resembles existing open-source code, allowing developers to make informed decisions about licensing compliance.

It's worth noting that while CodeWhisperer itself doesn't store your code, using it through certain IDEs or platforms might involve separate privacy considerations depending on your configuration.

Yes, you can use CodeWhisperer without an active AWS account for cloud services. While CodeWhisperer is an AWS product, you only need to create a free AWS Builder ID (which is separate from a standard AWS account) to access the Individual tier.

This means you can use CodeWhisperer with non-AWS projects and in environments that don't interact with AWS services at all. However, it's worth noting that CodeWhisperer's suggestions are often optimized for AWS services, so you'll see its full potential when working with AWS-related code.

For the Professional tier, your organization will need a standard AWS account for billing purposes and to access the administrative features, even if you're not using other AWS services.