Smart Stack

Side-by-side pricing, features and compliance for any tools in the directory.

Cursor vs Devin

Cursor

Anysphere

Pick it if: Full-stack engineers at startups who want to ship features without a QA bottleneck

Its edge: Background Cloud Agents running up to 10 parallel workers on Cursor's infrastructure, triggerable from Slack or mobile, which no other AI code editor matches as of mid-2026.

The catch: Context degradation on large codebases causes the AI to produce confident but incorrect multi-file edits, requiring careful human review that negates some of the speed benefit.

Devin

Cognition

Pick it if: Engineering managers with a backlog of well-scoped maintenance tasks

Its edge: Fully autonomous multi-hour task execution in a sandboxed VM with its own shell, editor, and browser, capable of migrating legacy codebases like COBOL and Fortran to Rust or Go with minimal human oversight.

The catch: ACU-based usage billing makes monthly costs unpredictable, often pushing real spend to $300-500/month even on the $20 entry plan, and Devin still struggles with ambiguous requirements and architectural decisions.

Pricing & access

Entry priceFree to startFrom $20/mo (up to $500/mo)
Free tiertruefalse
Paid tiersHobby — $0/mo; Pro — $20/mo; Pro+ — $60/moCore — $20/mo; Team — $500/mo; Enterprise
Hidden costsJune 2025 credit system change: manually selecting GPT-4o or Claude Opus burns the $20 monthly credit pool fast; heavy users face overage charges not visible in the plan headline price; Teams plan requires annual contract for invoice billinAgent Compute Units bill separately from the monthly subscription at $2.00-2.25 each, and a single multi-hour task can consume 10 or more ACUs; Enterprise VPC deployment, SSO, and dedicated support require a custom contract beyond the $500/
Budget fitmidmid

Verdict & fit

Killer featureBackground Cloud Agents running up to 10 parallel workers on Cursor's infrastructure, triggerable from Slack or mobile, which no other AI code editor matches as of mid-2026.Fully autonomous multi-hour task execution in a sandboxed VM with its own shell, editor, and browser, capable of migrating legacy codebases like COBOL and Fortran to Rust or Go with minimal human oversight.
Primary weaknessContext degradation on large codebases causes the AI to produce confident but incorrect multi-file edits, requiring careful human review that negates some of the speed benefit.ACU-based usage billing makes monthly costs unpredictable, often pushing real spend to $300-500/month even on the $20 entry plan, and Devin still struggles with ambiguous requirements and architectural decisions.
Best forFull-stack engineers at startups who want to ship features without a QA bottleneck; Engineering leads at mid-market companies replacing GitHub Copilot with a more agentic workflowEngineering managers with a backlog of well-scoped maintenance tasks; Platform teams running legacy code migrations
Worst forJetBrains users (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm) who are unwilling to switch IDEs; Healthcare software engineers who need HIPAA BAA coverageSolo indie developers on tight budgets; Teams needing fast interactive pair-programming for ambiguous feature work
Minimum skill levelintermediateintermediate
Defensibility97
Target audienceSoftware engineers at enterprises who need a full IDE with AI agents for complex multi-file refactors, Startup developers who want to ship features faster with autonomous Agent Mode, Teams already on VS Code looking for a zero-friction AI uEngineering managers triaging a backlog of well-scoped bug fixes and small features, Platform teams running legacy codebase migrations from COBOL, Fortran, or Objective-C to modern stacks, DevOps teams needing automated environment setup, d

Capabilities

Key featuresAgent Mode; Tab Completion; Cursor Automations (v3.8, June 2026)Autonomous end-to-end task delivery; Sandboxed VM environment; Legacy code migration
CapabilitiesFunction calling; Long context; Web browsingVision; Function calling; Long context
Strengths64% of Fortune 500 companies use Cursor as of early 2026, with 20,000+ developers at Salesforce alone, making it the most widely adopted AI code editor in enterprise.; Tab completions average 200ms, roughly 50ms faster than GitHub Copilot, Resolved 13.86% of real GitHub issues end-to-end at launch, about 7x the prior best of 1.96%, and Nubank reports a roughly 12x engineering-hours improvement on migration work using Devin.; Entry pricing dropped 96% from $500/month to $20/mo
Watch out forLarge codebases exceeding tens of thousands of lines hit context limits, forcing the AI to choose what to include and sometimes choosing wrong, producing confident but incorrect edits.; Native version control integration supports only GitHuAn independent test found Devin completed only 3 of 20 assigned tasks, well short of the 'fully autonomous' framing used in marketing.; Usage is billed in Agent Compute Units at $2.00-2.25 each (about 15 minutes of work per ACU), so real mo
Underlying model5x Standard usage on Agent; separate pools for Cursor-native and third-party API models
Context window200K
MCP supporttrue
Multimodaltext; code

Compare up to four at a time, or run Smart Match to get a ranked shortlist. Browse the full AI directory.