Kiro (Amazon Q Developer) review

Best for

AWS-centric teams who want plan-first, spec-driven development

Price

Freemium · from $20/month
Free: 50 credits a month

Platforms

Desktop app, Terminal, VS Code, JetBrains

Made by

Amazon Web Services

What it is

Kiro is AWS's agentic IDE and CLI, generally available since March 2026. It turns prompts into requirements, design and task documents, then implements them with parallel agents and checks behaviour with property-based tests. AWS is ending the Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins in April 2027 and points users to Kiro.

Latest: AWS will end support for the Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins in April 2027 and directs users to Kiro.

What the AI does

• Spec-driven development (requirements, design, tasks)
• Parallel local and cloud agents
• Property-based tests and requirement checks
• Agent hooks, steering files and MCP
• Headless CLI for CI pull request review
• Choice of Claude, GPT and open-weight models

Pros and cons

How it scores

Praised for feature-level work thanks to planning first, but still a young product with weaker inline help.

Feature checklist · 7 of 9

• ✓Autonomous agent mode that edits multiple files (yes)
• ✓Inline code completion as you type (yes)
• ✓Choice of AI models from more than one vendor (yes)
• –Use your own API keys, local models or self-hosted deployment (no)
• –Extension for existing IDEs (VS Code or JetBrains) (no)
• ✓Command-line (terminal) agent (yes)
• ✓Cloud agents that keep working in the background (yes)
• ✓AI code review for pull requests (yes)
• ✓Connects to external tools (MCP, plugins or apps like Slack and Jira) (yes)

How we score apps →

Alternatives

See all Kiro (Amazon Q Developer) alternatives, ranked →

• OpenAI Codex 8.7/10Developers who want parallel, asynchronous tasks and pull requests back, bundled with ChatGPT
• GitHub Copilot 8.6/10Developers and teams on GitHub who want AI in the IDE they already use, at the lowest entry price
• Claude Code 8.5/10Engineers who hand off large multi-file tasks and long autonomous runs
• Cursor 8.3/10IDE-first developers who want AI in every keystroke and the freedom to switch models

OpenAI Codex vs Kiro (Amazon Q Developer)

Sources

• Kiro pricing
• Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins end of support (AWS)
• Kiro review (Ricardo Gil, Aug 2026)