Did you know that refactoring can speed up software development by as much as 43%? This impressive boost is possible because cleaner, more maintainable code reduces bugs, simplifies updates, and streamlines feature development. The best part is that you don't have to do it manually! Modern tools now automate code optimization, making refactoring faster, safer, and more efficient than ever before. In this article, we’ll explore the 8 best code refactoring tools and how they can help you supercharge your development process. Let’s get started!
Zencoder is an advanced AI coding agent that enhances your software development lifecycle (SDLC) by boosting productivity, accuracy, and innovation. At the core of Zencoder’s platform is Repo Grokking™, a powerful AI technology that deeply analyzes entire codebases. It understands structure, patterns, and project-specific logic to deliver precise, context-aware code suggestions that seamlessly integrate with ongoing projects.
With its AI Agents, Zencoder helps you eliminate tedious debugging and time-consuming refactoring by:
Additionally, Zencoder integrates with your existing development tools, supporting over 70 programming languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, and more, and works effortlessly with popular IDEs like Visual Studio Code and JetBrains.
1️⃣ Integrations – Zencoder seamlessly integrates with over 20 developer environments, simplifying your entire development lifecycle. This makes it the only AI coding agent offering this extensive level of integration.
2️⃣ Code Generation – Accelerate your development with efficient, context-aware code generation. Instantly insert clean, production-ready code directly into your project, ensuring consistency, enhancing productivity, and helping you work faster.
3️⃣ Code Completion – Boost your coding speed with intelligent, real-time code suggestions. It understands your current context, delivering accurate and relevant completions to minimize errors and keep your workflow smooth.
4️⃣ Code Review Agent – Receive targeted code reviews at any level, from entire files to single lines. Get clear, actionable feedback to enhance code quality, strengthen security, and ensure adherence to best practices.
5️⃣ Unit Test Generation – Zencoder’s AI-powered system intelligently generates and executes detailed unit tests for various scenarios, ensuring your code is reliable, accurate, and maintains the highest quality standards.
6️⃣ Custom Agents – Design agents customized to your team’s specific workflow. Leverage deep code understanding and powerful automation to build unique solutions for your most critical tasks.
7️⃣ Chat Assistant – Access instant, accurate answers, personalized coding support, and smart recommendations, maintaining high productivity and a smooth workflow.
8️⃣ Zen Agents – Zen Agents are customizable AI teammates that understand your code, integrate with your tools, and are ready to launch in seconds.
Here is what you can do:
9️⃣ Security treble – Zencoder is the only AI coding agent with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 & ISO 42001 certification.
🟢 Pros:
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Zendocer offers a Free Plan, a Business Plan that starts at $19 per user/month, and an Enterprise Plan starting at $39 per user/month.
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a free and open-source code editor developed by Microsoft that supports a wide range of programming languages and is highly customizable through extensions. It offers advanced AI-powered features that enhance coding productivity by providing intelligent code suggestions, automated workflows, and integration with cloud services. VS Code excels at code refactoring with built-in tools for renaming symbols, extracting methods, and updating imports, along with extension support for advanced refactoring techniques across multiple languages.
1️⃣ Agent mode – Automates complex, multi-step tasks by reading codebases, suggesting edits, running commands, and handling errors in a continuous loop.
2️⃣ Next edit suggestions – Provides AI-powered code recommendations, predicting your next move and allowing quick acceptance with the Tab key.
3️⃣ Customizable with extensions – Enhances functionality with various extensions, including Python, Stripe, C/C++, Jupyter, GitLens, MongoDB, and more, many of which offer refactoring tools.
4️⃣ Multi-language support – Supports nearly all major programming languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, and HTML, enabling refactoring across languages through the VS Code Marketplace.
🟢 Pros:
🔴 Cons:
Visual Studio Code is an open-source tool, and you can use it for free.
IntelliJ IDEA is a professional integrated development environment (IDE) designed for Java and Kotlin developers, providing advanced tools to enhance productivity, code quality, and development efficiency. It supports the complete development lifecycle, from coding and testing to deployment, while integrating cutting-edge technologies and AI-powered features for faster and smarter coding. With powerful refactoring tools, intuitive debugging, and a vast plugin ecosystem, IntelliJ IDEA ensures clean, maintainable code and a seamless development experience.
1️⃣ Project-wide refactoring – Updates code across the entire project with safe and efficient refactoring options, including renaming, method extraction, and variable introduction.
2️⃣ Detection of code duplicates – Identifies and replaces repetitive code automatically, reducing redundancy and improving code quality.
3️⃣ Structural search and replace (SSR) – Finds and replaces code patterns with syntax-aware templates, ensuring consistent code structures.
4️⃣ Language injections – Supports embedded code from other languages with features like code highlighting, completion, and error detection for a multi-language experience.
🟢 Pros:
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IntelliJ IDEA offers 2 Paid Plans for organizations starting at €59.90 per month.
For individual use, it also offers 2 Paid Plans starting at €16.90 per month.
CodeScene is an AI-powered code analysis platform that helps you manage technical debt, improve code quality, and automate code reviews using its unique CodeHealth™ metric. It identifies productivity bottlenecks, enables AI-driven refactoring, and provides real-time quality feedback within IDEs, making code scalable and maintainable. CodeScene empowers teams to prioritize and prevent technical debt by visualizing high-risk code areas and providing actionable insights, enhancing software quality and accelerating development.
1️⃣ AI-powered refactoring – Refactors code directly in supported IDEs (IntelliJ, VS Code, Visual Studio) with AI-powered suggestions, helping you maintain clean, efficient code without manual effort.
2️⃣ Automated code reviews – Enforce code quality standards with code reviews and local quality gates, ensuring new code meets maintainability criteria.
3️⃣ Technical debt insights – Instantly visualize and quantify technical debt across your codebase, helping you identify and prioritize high-risk areas for refactoring to boost code quality and productivity.
4️⃣ Code health feedback – Receive instant feedback on code health directly in your IDE, empowering you to address quality issues immediately.
🟢 Pros:
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CodeScene offers 2 Paid Plans starting at €20 per month and an Enterprise Plan with custom pricing.
CodeRush for Visual Studio is a free coding productivity tool from DevExpress that significantly accelerates coding in C#, Visual Basic, and XAML through intelligent code generation, rapid refactoring, advanced code navigation, and formatting. It offers a fast .NET test runner, intuitive debugging features, and extensive support for code visualization, making it a good extension for Visual Studio developers. With over 100 refactorings, intelligent code providers, and customizable style settings, CodeRush helps you enhance code quality and development speed.
1️⃣ Automated code transformation – Instantly modifies API signatures, updates legacy code, and applies structural changes, minimizing manual work and ensuring consistent code quality.
2️⃣ Comprehensive refactoring options – Provides over 100 refactorings, enabling safe code restructuring, improving readability, and maintaining external behavior.
3️⃣ Intelligent code creation – Dynamically generates and modifies code elements based on usage patterns, ensuring accurate and efficient code updates.
4️⃣ Real-time code visualization – Highlights code blocks, previews values during debugging, and provides clear visual cues, making code easier to understand and maintain.
🟢 Pros:
🔴 Cons:
CodeRush is completely free to use and doesn’t have any pricing plans.
PhpStorm is a powerful IDE for PHP developers, offering intelligent code editing, easy navigation, and robust refactoring tools. It enables code refactoring across entire codebases, ensuring safe migrations, quick changes, and efficient project upgrades, all while maintaining code quality and compatibility. Additionally, it integrates with JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, and popular frameworks like Laravel and Symfony, offering advanced debugging, testing, and AI-powered code completion to boost productivity.
1️⃣ Smart refactoring – Quickly and safely modify code across the entire codebase, ensuring compatibility and minimizing errors.
2️⃣ Test-driven code quality – Generate unit tests, assess code coverage, and inspect results to maintain high code quality.
3️⃣ Visual debugging – Instantly identify and fix errors using live debugging data, conditional breakpoints, and code execution insights.
4️⃣ Intelligent code editing – Streamline coding with smart suggestions, syntax checks, and keyboard shortcuts for faster, error-free refactoring.
🟢 Pros:
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PhpStorm offers 2 Paid Plans for organizations starting at €24.90 per month.
For individual use, it also offers 2 Paid Plans starting at €9.90 per month.
Refraction is an AI-powered code generation tool that helps you automate various aspects of software development, including refactoring code, generating documentation, and creating unit tests across 56 programming languages. It offers a user-friendly interface where developers can simply paste their code, choose the desired language or framework, and instantly generate optimized code. Refraction integrates with popular development environments like VS Code, Sublime Text, and JetBrains, making it a versatile tool for developers across different workflows.
1️⃣ Code optimization – Refactors code to use modern practices, improving performance, readability, and maintainability.
2️⃣ Bug detection and fixing – Identifies bugs in code and suggests fixes, enhancing code reliability and reducing debugging time.
3️⃣ Literal separation – Extracts hardcoded strings or numbers into variables, increasing code flexibility and maintainability.
4️⃣ Style enforcement – Checks code for style issues and suggests improvements, ensuring consistent code quality and readability.
🟢 Pros:
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Refactoration offers a Free Plan, 2 Paid Plans starting at $8 per month, and an Enterprise Plan with custom pricing.
Tabnine is an AI-powered code assistant that helps accelerate and simplify software development, providing context-aware code suggestions, code refactoring, and bug fixing tailored to your coding practices. It ensures complete code privacy with zero data retention and offers flexible deployment options, including on-premises, VPC, or secure SaaS. Tabnine supports various IDEs and languages, enabling you to generate, refactor, debug, document, and maintain code efficiently.
1️⃣ Code generation and completion – Automatically generates and completes code based on natural language prompts, accelerating coding workflows.
2️⃣ Code explanation – Provides clear, understandable explanations of existing code, even if written by another developer or in an unfamiliar language.
3️⃣ Fixing and refactoring – Helps in fixing bugs, adding new functionality, and refactoring code based on natural language instructions.
4️⃣ Context-aware suggestions – Offers personalized code suggestions that adapt to your coding style, supporting popular languages, libraries, and IDEs.
🟢 Pros:
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Tabnine offers 2 Paid Plans starting at $9 per month.
Now that you know the 8 best code refactoring tools, it’s time to choose the one that best fits your development workflow. If you need a lightweight, highly customizable code editor with extensive refactoring support, Visual Studio Code is a good choice. For advanced, project-wide refactoring and intelligent code management, IntelliJ IDEA and PhpStorm provide powerful capabilities. However, if you are looking for a revolutionary AI tool that can streamline your refactoring, Zencoder is the perfect solution!
With Zencoder, you can:
⚡ Generate clean code – Quickly produce clean, production-ready code with AI, ensuring consistent quality and faster project delivery.
⚡ Boost code quality with smart reviews – Leverage AI-driven code reviews to maintain high-quality, secure code, simplify team collaboration, and support effective refactoring.
⚡ Automate comprehensive testing – Design and execute detailed unit tests automatically with AI, ensuring your code is accurate, reliable, and ready for deployment.
Sign up today and revolutionize your development workflow with our advanced AI-driven refactoring, code reviews, and automated testing!