Cursor vs GitHub Copilot

Copilot is cheaper at every comparable tier - Free, Pro $10, Pro+ $39 and Max $100 a month for individuals, Business $19 and Enterprise $39 per seat, against Cursor's Hobby free, Pro $20, Pro+ $60, Ultra $200, and Teams at $40 and $120 per user - and the gap is structural rather than a discount. Copilot installs into an editor you already run, so GitHub is selling an add-on. Cursor is a VS Code fork, so it is selling the editor, and the price has to cover the whole surface. That makes switching cost the number that actually matters. Your VS Code extensions, keybindings and settings largely carry across to Cursor; your team's standardisation on a single editor does not, and that is usually the harder cost. What the premium buys is a tighter loop - Composer, cloud agents, and MCP servers, skills and hooks designed into the editor rather than bolted onto it. Neither publishes a plain per-request quota: Cursor describes its limits as multiples of Pro, and GitHub in credits whose figures differ between its marketing and documentation pages. Both have a genuine free tier and both can sit alongside a third-party agent, so trying each costs time rather than money.