Claude Code vs Cursor

These are usually presented as rivals and mostly are not: the Claude Code extension installs into Cursor, and Anthropic states that a Pro or Max plan covers Claude Code in VS Code, Cursor and other VS Code forks, and JetBrains IDEs. What you are really choosing between is an editor with an agent built into it and an agent that follows you across surfaces. Cursor is a VS Code fork, priced Hobby free, Pro $20, Pro+ $60 and Ultra $200 a month, with Teams at $40 and $120 per user; what you buy is the editing surface itself - inline completion, the diff UI, Composer. Claude Code is billed through Claude Pro at $20 a month, or $17 on an annual plan, and Max from $100, or metered against an Anthropic API key at standard rates; what you buy is surface independence, since the terminal, IDE extensions, desktop app and web all run the same engine and read the same CLAUDE.md files and MCP servers. Budget by trial rather than by spec sheet: neither vendor publishes a plain per-request quota. Cursor states its limits as multiples of the Pro tier, and Anthropic says Claude Code shares your plan's rolling five-hour and weekly limits without publishing a Claude Code-specific number.