Top 8 collaboration tools that you need to know for remote work & AI integration

Remote work has become the norm for millions of developers. The 2025 Gallup Research highlights this trend, with at least 27% of its respondents reporting that they work remotely and another 53 % working in a hybrid setup. 

According to a survey by Forbes, remote workers are 13% more productive, and to ramp up these numbers, effective remote team collaboration is a necessity for every modern developer.

In this article, I will introduce you to 8 code collaboration tools  for engineers that will speed up your remote work experience. These tools are a mix of personal suggestions (with experience of working 4+ years remotely) and from various discussions on Reddit and other forums.

The selection criteria include:

• Ease of use

• Support for third-party integrations

• Pricing

• Core features

TLDR of all the tools;

1. Pieces – The all-in-one assistant that can help you code, research, and be your memory. Team members stuck in meetings? Need help understanding lines of code? You have Pieces for that!

2. Visual Studio Live Share – Remote work is all about collaboration. We need people who can review our work, and one hero feature in that is real-time collaboration. Visual Studio Live Share helps in coding together with your colleagues.

3. Replit – Have an idea and want to show a quick proof-of-concept? Replit has you covered. You can now spin up apps and sites using a prompt.

4. CodeAnywhere – Remote work also means you might be working from the beach or the mountains, and in such cases, an online editor with real time code collaboration features and AI is helpful. With CodeAnywhere, you can literally code from anywhere.

5. CodeTogether – Work also comes with metrics to measure, and a tool like CodeTogether can help you streamline the entire software development lifecycle.

6. GitHub – GitHub is a must-have when it comes to async collaboration as developers. Be it for pushing feature updates, testing, or writing documentation, GitHub can do it all.

7. Confluence – As much as we hate documentation as developers, it is key for async communication, and with Confluence, managing tasks, internal documentation, and discussing projects is seamless.

8. Slack – We need an all-in-one app to share code, have a quick call, chat, share files, and read company-wide announcements. So far, Slack does it the best.

Pieces

While working remotely, you might feel like you are working alone, especially when your team is spread across different time zones.

Pieces is an AI tool that can save snippets to share with your team members, act as a research assistant, and help you with writing and understanding code. 

You can do all of this locally, with LLMs of your choice, ensuring there is no privacy breach. It is also a very flexible tool, you can integrate it with your IDE of choice and even use it with third-party tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot.

Key overview:

• Core features offered: Pieces lets you save your snippets, share them, use AI-assisted snippet search, browse snippet collections, and employ AI info generation for your snippets.

• Ease of use: Pieces is very easy to use, especially thanks to its support for a large number of platforms you're already familiar with, such as Chrome and VS Code.

• Third-party integrations: Chrome and Edge extensions, Obsidian extension, JupyterLab extension, VS Code and JetBrains extensions, Microsoft Teams extension.

• UI/UX: Pieces offers an easy-to-use, central desktop app to manage your snippets and a lot of extensions to save them with ease.

• Pricing: Pieces is 100 percent free, with a pro plan coming soon.

• Platforms supported: The Pieces desktop app works on Linux, macOS, and Windows. However, with the previously mentioned integrations, you can make it work wherever you need it.

• Use of AI: Pieces greatly supports the use of AI to provide natural language processing (NLP) snippet searches, give context to your snippets, and ask questions about your code.

• Ability to reduce context switching: High; You can easily save your snippets from your IDE, browser, or writing tool without interrupting your workflow.

• Acceleration/ease offered to dev workflow: Pieces is great for reusing code you may need in the future, for sharing code with your peers, and also for sharing code with a technical writing audience.

To start using Pieces, you can download the tool for your preferred OS or platform. Pieces is supported on every major OS as a desktop app (Linux, Windows, or macOS) and across a huge variety of other tools, like your browser (Chrome or Edge), your IDE (JetBrains or VS Code), and Microsoft Teams.

After this process, you can immediately start saving your snippets. Consider the following scenario: you have a code snippet that you use often in your code, which you save somewhere using your machine's note-taking app. 

The problem is that you might struggle to find the same snippet again in your sea of notes, and this approach can rapidly become a mess once you have a bunch of snippets you need to save.

Say you want to save the CSS reset you use in all your web apps. With Pieces, all you need to do is click the Add Snippets button on the bottom of the screen, and then you can choose to save snippets from the multiple options as shown below:

AI is a part of Pieces, and you'll be able to use it as a companion for a multitude of tasks. 

For example, Pieces provides a copilot AI engine called Pieces Copilot that can explain code snippets or even add inline comments in natural language so that you're aware at every moment of the purpose of each snippet.

If you need some inspiration for some useful snippets you may need, Pieces offers snippet collections for every major coding language. 

Once you have a few snippets saved, you can search through them using the tool's internal search feature. 

You can search through your snippets by coding language or exact string, and even use natural language processing thanks to the Pieces AI engine:

If you want to share your snippets with somebody, Pieces allows you to create shareable links to send code to your teammates along with AI-enriched data.

Save the code here.

'use client'

import { useState } from 'react'
import { Input } from '@/components/ui/input'
import { Button } from '@/components/ui/button'
import { Search } from 'lucide-react'
import { MovieCard } from './components/movie-card'
import type { Movie } from './types/movie'

const TMDB_ACCESS_TOKEN = process.env.TMDB_ACCESS_TOKEN
const ACCOUNT_ID = process.env.ACCOUNT_ID

export default function MovieSearch() {
  const [query, setQuery] = useState('')
  const [movies, setMovies] = useState<Movie[]>([])
  const [loading, setLoading] = useState(false)
  const [error, setError] = useState<string | null>(null)

  async function handleSearch(e: React.FormEvent) {
    e.preventDefault()
    if (!query.trim()) {
      setError('Please enter a movie name')
      return
    }

    setLoading(true)
    setError(null)
    setMovies([])

    try {
      console.log(`Searching for movie: ${query}`)
      const url = `https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?query=${encodeURIComponent(query)}`
      console.log(`API URL: ${url}`)

      const response = await fetch(url, {
        headers: {
          'Authorization': `Bearer ${TMDB_ACCESS_TOKEN}`,
          'Content-Type': 'application/json'
        }
      })

      if (!response.ok) {
        const errorText = await response.text()
        console.error(`API responded with status ${response.status}: ${errorText}`)
        throw new Error(`API error: ${response.status} - ${errorText}`)
      }

      const data = await response.json()
      console.log('API Response:', data)

      if (data.results.length === 0) {
        setError('No movies found. Try a different search term.')
      } else {
        setMovies(data.results)
      }
    } catch (error) {
      console.error('Error searching movies:', error)
      setError(`An error occurred while searching for movies: ${error instanceof Error ? error.message : 'Unknown error'}`)
    } finally {
      setLoading(false)
    }
  }

  async function handleFetchRatedMovies() {
    setLoading(true)
    setError(null)
    setMovies([])

    try {
      console.log('Fetching rated movies')
      const url = `https://api.themoviedb.org/3/account/${ACCOUNT_ID}/rated/movies`
      console.log(`API URL: ${url}`)

      const response = await fetch(url, {
        headers: {
          'Authorization': `Bearer ${TMDB_ACCESS_TOKEN}`,
          'Content-Type': 'application/json'
        }
      })

      if (!response.ok) {
        const errorText = await response.text()
        console.error(`API responded with status ${response.status}: ${errorText}`)
        throw new Error(`API error: ${response.status} - ${errorText}`)
      }

      const data = await response.json()
      console.log('API Response:', data)

      if (data.results.length === 0) {
        setError('No rated movies found.')
      } else {
        setMovies(data.results)
      }
    } catch (error) {
      console.error('Error fetching rated movies:', error)
      setError(`An error occurred while fetching rated movies: ${error instanceof Error ? error.message : 'Unknown error'}`)
    } finally {
      setLoading(false)
    }
  }

  return (
    <div className="container mx-auto py-10 space-y-8">
      <form onSubmit={handleSearch} className="flex gap-4 max-w-2xl mx-auto">
        <Input
          type="text"
          placeholder="Enter a movie name..."
          value={query}
          onChange={(e) => setQuery(e.target.value)}
          className="flex-1"
        />
        <Button type="submit" disabled={loading}>
          {loading ? 'Searching...' : (
            <>
              <Search className="w-4 h-4 mr-2" />
              Search
            </>
          )}
        </Button>
      </form>

      <div className="flex justify-center">
        <Button onClick={handleFetchRatedMovies} disabled={loading}>
          {loading ? 'Fetching...' : 'Fetch Rated Movies'}
        </Button>
      </div>

      {error && (
        <div className="max-w-2xl mx-auto mt-4 p-4 bg-red-100 border border-red-400 text-red-700 rounded">
          {error}
        </div>
      )}

      {movies.length > 0 && (
        <div className="grid grid-cols-1 md:grid-cols-2 lg:grid-cols-3 gap-6">
          {movies.map(movie => (
            <MovieCard key={movie.id} movie={movie} />
          ))}
        </div>
      )}
    </div>
  )
}

Apart from improved collaboration, this functionality makes Pieces one of the best companions for technical writing as well. You can easily share snippets with your audience, accompanied by AI-generated information.

Alternatively, you can compile a collection of reusable snippets for your articles or leverage the transformation feature to create boilerplate code templates frequently used by your team and share them (for instance, when writing technical documentation).

Why use Pieces for remote work?

From the description of Pieces above and the feature list, we saw all that one can do with Pieces. When it comes to remote work, Pieces can not only help in coding and understanding code with the help of its assistant, but it can also help in collaboration with its snippet-sharing feature.

Visual Studio Live Share

Visual Studio Live Share is an online code collaboration tool. It is an extension of the popular Visual Studio Code IDE that allows developers to bring their peers into their editor. 

You can send an invite link to let your colleagues write, edit, and debug code as if they were in the same physical location as you. 

This removes the challenges of working remotely when it comes to pair programming and brainstorming together.

Key overview:

• Core features offered: This code collaboration tool offers real-time paired programming, live code editing, code writing, and debugging.

• Ease of use: Very high; you just need to install the extension and invite your peers.

• Third-party integrations: Visual Studio Live Share integrates with dozens of coding-related tools you would normally use in Visual Studio Code, like CodeStream, Live Server, and Quokka.js.

• UI/UX: Basic UI experience embedded inside the editor.

• Pricing: It is one of the first free code collaboration tools.

• Platforms supported: Visual Studio Code.

• Use of AI: Not supported.

• Ability to reduce context switching: High; all you need to do is invite a peer into a shared coding session to start collaborating immediately, without ever leaving Visual Studio Code.

• Acceleration/ease offered to dev workflow: Visual Studio Live Share enables faster access to pair programming sessions with your peers.

Why use Visual Studio Live Share for remote work?

VS Code is the preferred IDE of millions of developers worldwide, including probably you and your team. Its official Live Share extension allows you to initiate quick remote pair programming sessions directly within the IDE, giving you the same remote coding experience you're used to without resorting to additional code collaboration tools. 

Replit

Replit is a coding platform with an online IDE that relieves the burden of developing software locally on your machine. No downloads, no config, no setup. Replit's online code editor with a collaborative coding environment, makes it extremely easy, especially for beginners, to focus solely on building your projects.

Additionally, Replit offers a few powerful features to level up your coding. It has a collaborative IDE where you can write code in real time with other devs, share code snippets, and edit files together. 

Plus, you will be able to power up your code with the help of Ghostwriter, Replit's built-in AI chat that will help you create, edit, and debug code.

Key overview:

• Core features offered: Replit provides an online IDE with no setup or downloads needed to create a project, easy project deployment, an AI coding chat assistant, and live code sharing and editing.

• Ease of use: High, thanks to Replit hiding every tedious setup detail from its users.

• Third-party integrations: Not supported.

• UI/UX: An intuitive web app.

• Pricing: Free for single users, starting at $15 per month for solo developers.

• Platforms supported: Web platform and access from a mobile app for iOS and Android.

• Use of AI: Extensive, thanks to its AI code-writing assistant.

• Ability to reduce context switching: High, thanks to its all-in-one online editor and AI assistant that's ready to help you when you struggle.

• Acceleration/ease offered to dev workflow: Replit offers a faster development experience thanks to its AI assistant and removal of setups, making it especially useful for beginner developers creating solo projects.

Why use Replit?

Replit is a great choice for code collaboration online thanks to its shared coding workspace. With real-time code sharing and instant feedback, team members can work seamlessly from different locations. 

Plus, the code collaboration tool's cloud-based setup removes the burden of running projects locally, avoiding a lot of configuration issues you and your team could have across different machines.

Codeanywhere

Codeanywhere is a cloud-based IDE that allows teams to collaborate remotely on their projects in real-time. It is listed as one of the best code collaboration tools by The CTO club.

The platform provides developers with all the comforts they're used to when working locally on their code, with support for all the languages supported by VS Code, autocomplete, code refactoring, a fully featured Git client, and a marketplace of code extensions.

In addition, you'll get the advantages of working in the cloud, like remote work collaboration in real-time with your peers using pair programming, shared terminal sessions, or by sharing part of your code in real-time.

Key overview:

• Core features offered: Codeanywhere provides a fully featured cloud IDE that lets you modify files directly on the server. It is ideal for coding collaboration as it offers support for real-time pair programming, code sharing, and spinning up containers on the cloud, as well as a fully featured web-based terminal. 

• Ease of use: New users may encounter a steeper learning curve due to the cloud environment.

• Third-party integrations: Codeanywhere has support for all the main coding-related tools (CI/CD tools, databases, and code management tools).

• UI/UX: An easy-to-use web app.

• Pricing: It has monthly, year and 2 year plan with free, basic, premium and premium GPU tiers.

• Platforms supported: A web app and a mobile app.

• Use of AI: Not supported.

• Ability to reduce context switching: Yes, thanks to its capability to start real-time pair programming sessions on the cloud.

Why use Codeanywhere for remote work?

Similar to Replit, Codeanywhere's cloud environment will help your remote team work without the hassle of configuring local machines. It also has the added advantage of offering live pair programming support or shared terminal sessions.

CodeTogether

What if you could pair programs with your peers while still using your preferred IDE? CodeTogether offers this feature with an extension supported by every major IDE (VS Code, Eclipse, and IntelliJ). 

With CodeTogether, you can host a pairing session in seconds, set the access levels for your peers, and watch them collaborate with you in the style of Google Docs.

This tool provides a highly customizable experience for your session guests. You can decide which files they can open, whether they can edit your code, and even set their tests and terminal access.

Key overview:

• Core features offered: CodeTogether offers cross-IDE pairing sessions, file editing in the style of Google Docs, access settings for guests when hosting sessions, shared server terminals and consoles, built-in video call tools, and encrypted calls.

• Ease of use: CodeTogether requires a small learning curve to learn how to use the tool.

• Third-party integrations: CodeTogether allows you to use any third-party integration you want with your preferred IDE.

• UI/UX: An easy-to-use integration for your favorite IDE.

• Pricing: To use CodeTogether, you need to request for access and there are no free tiers, however it has a starter plan that starts from $10/per developer and has a free trial period.

• Platforms supported: VS Code, Eclipse, IntelliJ, browser access.

• Use of AI: Not supported.

• Ability to reduce context switching: High; the tool has a built-in video call service, and it allows devs to never leave their preferred editor.

Why use CodeTogether?

Sometimes you and your remote peers will have different IDEs in use but still require a pair programming session. 

CodeTogether provides a collaborative coding platform that allows you to work with your peers in whatever IDE you prefer, giving you a wide variety of options for granting your colleagues permission to access your environment. 

GitHub

GitHub is a no-brainer if you work at a tech company or in a tech role. It is the first tool that comes to mind when you think of software development collaboration tools. GitHub is a web-based platform where you can store, share, and collaborate on code. The code is added to a repository, and you can set its sharing settings to public or private. Then, simply share the link (if it is public) or invite your colleagues (if it is a private repository) to work together.

It uses Git to track changes to code, and it is also helpful in managing projects. With the help of GitHub actions, you can automate many things, including test cases. You can also view and make changes to the code by simply typing.

Which opens up a GitHub Codespace (a development environment that runs on the cloud and requires no setup). Most companies use GitHub to manage the entire software development lifecycle.

Key overview:

• Core features offered: It can be seen as a code-sharing tool primarily, but it also offers the ability to store and collaborate on code and can help in managing the entire software development lifecycle. 

• Ease of use: GitHub has a simple UI; however, to get started, you need to have your Git concepts clear.

• Third-party integrations: GitHub is very flexible with third-party integrations. You can use it as an authentication method, you can add applications like Synk that can track vulnerabilities, and even to collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams.

• UI/UX: Both the browser and desktop version of GitHub have a simple and easy-to-follow UI/UX.

• Pricing: GitHub is free for individual developers, has a team plan that starts with $4 per month per developer and an enterprise plan of $21 per month per user.

• Platforms supported: It can be used in the web, mobile and desktop.

• Use of AI: GitHub Copilot can help you in generate PR messages, and now with its free integration with VS Code, it can also help you code.

• Ability to reduce context switching: High; it is a highly flexible tool that supports multiple automation.

• Acceleration/ease offered to dev workflow: GitHub is built for developers, and with features like GitHub Actions it eases the entire development workflow.

Why use GitHub?

You and your teammates will work on multiple features or bugs, and together these will build the product. GitHub is the tool where you all push the code and then take it live from there. It is a very crucial part of how products are built.

Confluence

A company has different functions. 

There will be an HR/People team, a team of engineers, designers, program and project managers, salespeople, and multiple other roles. Each function is important and contributes to the growth of the company. 

Depending on company goals, there is often cross-team collaboration, and in a remote setup, the best way to do this is through documentation. 

Confluence is a tool by Atlassian that can help you document things, and organize pages, and attachments. You can also use the advanced search and page tree to quickly find and label key docs in a well-organized page tree.

Why use Confluence?

Decision-making is key for a company’s growth, and to make these decisions there needs to be data. Confluence makes this entire process a breeze, helps in making quick decisions, and gains alignment.

Slack

The key to successful remote work lies in async communication. There is a high chance that your team lead is in a very different timezone than you, but work still needs to be done. 

This is where async communication plays an important role, and you need a tool like Slack. It helps you get the work done by bringing together people, processes, data, agents, and AI into one conversational interface.

Key overview:

• Core features offered: Ability to communicate with team members effectively in a remote setup. Which also includes file-sharing, huddles, and the ability to create channels, DMs.

• Ease of use: It is very simple to use Slack and does not require any prior knowledge to get started.

• Third-party integrations: Slack has multiple third-party integrations with tools like Figma, Asana, Google Sheet, Salesforce and more.

• UI/UX: Has a simple and easy to use UI/UX.

• Pricing: It has a free tier, followed by pro tier starting from $7.25 per person/month, business+ at $12.50 and enterprise grid plans.

• Platforms supported: It can be used in the web, mobile and desktop.

• Use of AI: It has AI support that can help you with search, summaries and answering questions.

• Ability to reduce context switching: The key to successful remote work lies in async communication. There is a high chance that your team lead is in a very different timezone than you, but work still needs to be done. This is where async communication plays an important role, and you need a tool like Slack. It helps you get the work done by bringing together people, processes, data, agents, and AI into one conversational interface.

• Acceleration/ease offered to dev workflow: Slack has powerful APIs that can help you automate work.

Why use Slack?

You need a tool for conversations, brainstorming sessions, and coffee chats with your colleagues, as well as a place to learn about important announcements and updates and share your work for review. All of these can be done in Slack.

Where to go from here

Remote work is here to stay. The more you streamline the entire development and management processes, the more productive your team becomes. 

In this article, we talked about 8 programming collaboration tools that can not only improve collaboration but also help in async communication, make team coding more effective, and make use of AI to code better or get a recap.

If you would like to check out more such tools, here are some articles you can follow:

• Best AI code generators to write code better and faster

• 10 Developer productivity tools for working smarter, not harder

• 10 Best AI tools for developers in 2025

• AI jobs you should know by now

This article was first published on October 18th, 2023, and was improved by Haimantika Mitra as of February 3rd, 2025, to improve your experience and share the latest information.