Side-by-side pricing, features and compliance for any tools in the directory.
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.
Cognition AI
Pick it if: Solo full-stack developers building SaaS MVPs who want agentic AI without a Cursor subscription
Its edge: Windsurf Tab autocomplete that never counts against usage quotas on any plan, making it the only AI IDE where the core autocomplete is genuinely unlimited regardless of tier.
The catch: Post-acquisition uncertainty (Cognition bought the business, Google hired key founders) creates real risk of product direction changes or deprecation that competitor Cursor does not face.
| Entry price | Free to start | Free to start |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | true | true |
| Paid tiers | Hobby — $0/mo; Pro — $20/mo; Pro+ — $60/mo | Free — $0/mo; Pro — $20/mo; Max — $200/mo |
| Hidden costs | June 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 billin | 25 free prompt credits last 3 days for a typical developer, forcing an immediate Pro upgrade that doubles the expected monthly cost; Add-on credits cost $40 per 1,000 credits and are not clearly surfaced until a developer hits their monthly |
| Budget fit | mid | budget |
| Killer feature | 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. | Windsurf Tab autocomplete that never counts against usage quotas on any plan, making it the only AI IDE where the core autocomplete is genuinely unlimited regardless of tier. |
|---|---|---|
| Primary weakness | 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. | Post-acquisition uncertainty (Cognition bought the business, Google hired key founders) creates real risk of product direction changes or deprecation that competitor Cursor does not face. |
| Best for | Full-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 workflow | Solo full-stack developers building SaaS MVPs who want agentic AI without a Cursor subscription; Frontend engineers who want live preview and in-editor deployment as part of their iteration loop |
| Worst for | JetBrains users (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm) who are unwilling to switch IDEs; Healthcare software engineers who need HIPAA BAA coverage | Enterprise engineering leads who need stable vendor relationships and SLA guarantees, given recent acquisition turbulence; Developers working on monorepos larger than 500k lines where CPU spikes to 90% make the tool impractical |
| Minimum skill level | intermediate | basic |
| Defensibility | 9 | 6 |
| Target audience | Software 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 u | Solo developers and freelance engineers building MVPs who want agentic AI without paying Cursor's $20/month from day one, VS Code users who want embedded AI without switching editors or learning a new interface, Frontend developers who want |
| Key features | Agent Mode; Tab Completion; Cursor Automations (v3.8, June 2026) | Rebranded to Devin Desktop (June 2, 2026); Cascade AI Agent; Codemaps |
|---|---|---|
| Capabilities | Function calling; Long context; Web browsing | Vision; Function calling; Code execution |
| Strengths | 64% 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, | Free tier includes unlimited Tab autocomplete with no quota drain, making it genuinely usable for solo developers without spending anything.; Installs in under 2 minutes and reuses the VS Code extension ecosystem via Open VSX Registry, so e |
| Watch out for | Large 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 GitHu | Daily and weekly quotas refresh automatically but can still run dry in heavy sessions, and the Free tier quota is low enough to push most active developers toward a paid plan within days.; On large projects CPU usage can spike to 70-90%, sl |
| Underlying model | 5x Standard usage on Agent; separate pools for Cursor-native and third-party API models | — |
| Context window | 200K | — |
| MCP support | true | — |
| Multimodal | text; code | — |
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