Best AI IDEs in the UK

Retool is the AI-native enterprise app development platform where teams build and ship production-ready apps — at AI speed, with enterprise governance built in. Describe what you need and get a working app, import React-based apps from Lovable, Replit, or Claude Code, or connect your AI agent via MCP. However your team builds, every app lands in Retool with RBAC, SSO, audit logging, and your existing permissions already in place. Retool connects to databases, APIs, LLMs, and external tools out of the box. Teams can build AI agents, dashboards, workflows, and full-stack apps — with a visual editor for speed and direct code access for precision. Trusted by over 10,000 organizations including Amazon, Stripe, DoorDash, and OpenAI to get AI-built apps safely to production.

Aqua is the first IDE created specifically for test automation. It‘s an all-in-one workspace that supports Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright. Aqua is a polyglot IDE that understands Java, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Kotlin, and SQL. Get straight to testing without having to install and configure lots of plugins. Aqua boasts a unique feature set containing everything a test automation engineer needs on a daily basis. Aqua’s Web Inspector works like a built-in browser and allows you to capture any page element without switching to another tool. There is also the HTTP client for API testing and integration with databases, Docker, and version control. Aqua minimizes the hassle for even the most challenging tasks. The combination of intelligent code analysis, powerful search and refactoring capabilities, and overall ease of use enables you to boost your quality engineering productivity.

Eclipse Theia is an extensible platform to develop multi-language Cloud & Desktop IDEs with state-of-the-art web technologies. Not sure whether you need a web or desktop version or both? With Theia you can develop one IDE and run it in browsers or native desktop application from a single source. The Theia project is hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation, and is developed by a diverse community. Unlike other "open-source" projects, projects hosted at an Open-Source Foundation are protected against single-vendor decisions against the interest of the diverse community. Theia is designed in a modular way to allow extenders and adopters customizing and extending every aspect of it. Composing a custom IDE-like product is as easy as listing all needed extensions in a package.json file. Adding new functionality by implementing your own extensions is easy, too and provides all the flexibility you need.

Agentforce Vibes introduces vibe coding, a generative AI–powered approach that lets developers convert natural language instructions into production-ready Salesforce applications with enterprise-grade security, governance, and infrastructure. Unlike simpler vibe coding tools aimed at prototyping, Agentforce Vibes supports the full development lifecycle, ideation, building, testing, deployment, and observability, while integrating with Salesforce’s platform and trust layers. It functions as an AI-powered IDE (usable within VS Code or any VS Code-compatible environment) that understands your Salesforce schema and metadata, enabling features such as agentic code generation (Apex, HTML, CSS, JavaScript), intelligent rule enforcement, test case generation, debugging, rollbacks, and natural language DevOps. It supports multiple language models, is extensible via Model Context Protocol (MCP) with over 20 built-in tools, and allows reuse of existing code.