Disclosure: DevTools Review has no confirmed affiliate or commission relationship with Amazon Q Developer — AWS runs a partner network, not a publisher affiliate programme, and we don't earn anything if you click through. This review is based on four months of hands-on use across two AWS-heavy projects.
According to DevTools Review's hands-on testing, Amazon Q Developer is genuinely excellent at one thing — deep AWS integration — and unremarkable at everything else. That verdict still holds. What's changed, and what our review page hadn't caught up to, is that you can no longer sign up for it.
What actually changed
AWS closed new signups for Q Developer Pro and the IDE plugin on 2026-05-15. Two weeks later, on 2026-05-29, it pulled frontier models off Q Developer Pro entirely and reserved them for a separate product, Kiro, which now carries its own individual pricing ladder (Free, then paid tiers up to $200/mo). Existing Q Developer subscribers keep their access, with end-of-support confirmed for 2027-04-30 — but nobody new is getting in the door, and AWS's own announcement is the source, not a rumor: aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/amazon-q-developer-end-of-support-announcement.
None of that was in our review. We wrote it when Q Developer was a normal, purchasable product, and it quietly stopped being one.
What still holds up from four months of use
AWS Console integration is the real differentiator. We asked it "why are my Lambda invocations timing out since yesterday?" — it checked our CloudWatch metrics, correlated the timeout spike with a deployment that had increased the database connection pool size beyond what our RDS instance could handle, and suggested both an immediate fix and a longer-term one. That's not generic advice; it read our actual account.
The Java transformation agent earns its keep. We ran it against a ~200-file Java 11 Spring Boot app targeting Java 21. It handled the javax.* → jakarta.* namespace migration, replaced deprecated APIs, and updated Maven plugin versions — about 85% correct on the first pass, with the remaining 15% concentrated in custom class loaders and reflection-heavy code. A two-week migration became a three-day review.
General-purpose completions never caught up. Outside AWS-specific code, Cursor and Copilot were consistently ahead in our side-by-side testing — Q Developer felt roughly six months behind on multi-line prediction accuracy for TypeScript, Python, and Go.
The bottom line
If you're already an AWS shop with an existing Q Developer subscription, keep using it — the AWS-specific value is real and nothing about the closure changes what it does well. If you don't already have access, you can't get it; AWS is steering new users toward Kiro instead. Either way, the tool's competitive position outside the AWS ecosystem was never strong, and that part of the assessment hasn't moved.
Full review, pros/cons, and head-to-head comparisons against Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code: https://devtoolsreview.com/reviews/amazon-q-review/