Announced in October 2025 by JetBrains, the Czech company behind IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm, Matter is an AI prototyping environment aimed at product teams. Its defining trait is that it does not start from a blank page ─ it connects to a repository you already have. Link a GitHub repository and a live preview spins up in an isolated environment; from there, prompts such as “move this button to the right” or “show a discount only under this condition” are implemented by an AI agent that edits the actual code and reflects it in the preview. Once the result looks right, you can open a pull request straight from Matter and hand the work to the engineering team. The tool is designed to close the gap between design mockups and real implementation, and as of August 2026 it is offered through an Early Access Program (EAP).
Key Features
- Connects directly to an existing codebase: Link a GitHub repository and a live preview starts within minutes. Unlike tools that generate a brand-new project, you experiment on the real product’s code, design, and data structures
- An AI agent implements your prompted changes: Describe UI and layout adjustments or business-logic experiments in plain language, and the agent rewrites the code. No coding is required from the person making the request
- Runs in an isolated environment: All changes happen away from production, so experimental edits cannot affect the running product
- Real-time sharing and collaboration: Working prototypes can be shared with teammates and stakeholders as-is. Feedback is gathered on something people can actually click, not a static mockup
- Handoff through GitHub integration: You can create a pull request directly from a finished prototype, or draft an issue that carries the code and an explanation ─ removing the step of conveying requirements through conversation and screenshots
- Built for people other than developers: The premise is that product managers and designers can validate ideas themselves without pulling engineers off their work
Pricing
| Plan | Price | What’s included |
|---|---|---|
| Early Access Program | Not published on the official site (contact JetBrains) | GitHub integration, live preview, AI-agent edits, team sharing |
As of August 2026 Matter is in its Early Access Program, and neither the official site nor the announcement blog publishes a pricing plan. Access terms and any future pricing model require signing up or contacting JetBrains through the official site.
Pricing information is current as of August 2026. Please check the official website for the latest details.
Pros & Cons
✅ Pros
- Because validation happens on the real codebase, mismatches such as “it worked in the design but breaks in implementation” surface early
- A prototype becomes a pull request, cutting the cost of writing documents just to convey requirements
- Product managers and designers can try ideas themselves, reducing the wait for engineering availability
- Work happens in an isolated environment, so experiments cannot break production code
- Sharing a working prototype makes stakeholder feedback far more concrete
⚠️ Cons
- Only web-based projects are supported; mobile and desktop applications are out of scope
- Projects spanning multiple services, or with non-trivial business logic or complex frontend operations, are described as beyond its current reach
- Pricing is not published, so the cost of a full rollout is hard to estimate
- As an Early Access Program product, features may change and bugs may appear
- It requires connecting a repository, so organizations with restrictions on linking code to external services need to weigh that first
Comparison with Similar Services
| Criteria | Matter | v0 (Vercel) | Lovable | Figma Make |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Provider | JetBrains | Vercel | Lovable | Figma |
| Starting point | An existing repository | Largely from scratch | Largely from scratch | Design files / prompts |
| Primary audience | Product teams (PMs, designers, developers) | Frontend developers | Non-engineers and solo builders | Designers |
| How work is handed off | Pull request / issue draft | Copying or exporting code | Deploying the generated app | Sharing a prototype |
| Strongest at | Validating changes to an existing product | Generating UI components | Standing up small apps | Prototyping from designs |
Put simply, Matter is a tool for trying the next move on a product that already exists, rather than for going from zero to one. If you want to launch a new app quickly, Lovable or v0 fit better; when you need to validate a proposed change against real code and real data on a service already in operation, Matter’s design pays off.
Who Is It For
- Product managers who have hit the limits of conveying requirements through words and mockups
- Designers who want to see for themselves how a design behaves once it is implemented
- Development teams buried under a backlog of “could you just try this quickly” requests
- Teams that would rather compare improvement ideas for an existing web product as working software than as meeting-room discussion
- Organizations already using JetBrains tooling that want to try the company’s AI products
Summary
Matter reframes AI prototyping from “generating something from a blank page” to “making changes to an existing codebase.” Letting product managers and designers validate ideas on the real code and pass the result along as a pull request measurably reduces the friction between describing a requirement and implementing it. On the other hand, its scope is limited to web projects, and products with complex architectures are still outside its comfort zone. With the Early Access Program under way and pricing unpublished, the sensible starting point is a smaller web product ─ try it there and see whether it fits how your team works.