Last updated: 2026-10-16
What changed
Cursor, Anysphere's AI code editor, joined SpaceX's SpaceXAI division after an all-stock deal that closed on 14 August 2026. It is now sold with Grok and X in one subscription, runs Agent, Cloud Agents and Bugbot across Premium, Super and Ultra, and connects to GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps plus MCP integrations.
About Cursor
Cursor is an AI-powered code editor built by Anysphere (founded 2022, Cambridge MA), a fork of VS Code that replaces the extension layer with deep, system-level AI integration. As of mid-2026, it is used by roughly two in three Fortune 500 companies, including 20,000+ developers at Salesforce alone, and reached an estimated $4 billion in annualized revenue by mid-2026, up from $2 billion in February 2026. Every VS Code theme, keybinding, and extension works in Cursor without reconfiguration.
The core product advantage over GitHub Copilot and other AI extensions is architectural access: by forking VS Code rather than running as an extension, Cursor controls the editor's rendering pipeline, file system, and extension host. This enables the Shadow Workspace for semantic codebase indexing, speculative suggestions that render in real time, and Background Agents running in isolated VMs on Cursor's cloud infrastructure. Agent Mode lets a developer describe what they want in plain English, and Cursor autonomously carries out the work end to end, from editing source files to running commands and fixing its own failures. Benchmarks show Tab completions responding well ahead of GitHub Copilot's own completion speed.
In late 2025 and early 2026, Cursor expanded beyond the IDE. Cloud Agents run autonomously on Cursor's infrastructure and can be triggered from a browser, mobile device, or Slack, editing code, running tests, and filing pull requests while the developer is away from the desktop. Cursor v3.0 introduced Background Agents for parallel work and Composer for coordinated multi-file changes trained with scaled reinforcement learning. Native MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration connects agents directly to GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, Linear, Jira, Postgres, Supabase, and Slack without context-switching.
Since the SpaceX deal, Cursor is sold as part of the X Subscription, one plan covering Cursor, Grok and X, and it is bought only through X Subscription Corp. The self-serve ladder runs from a Free tier through Plus, Premium, Super and Ultra, each step multiplying the usage allowance; the pricing summary above carries the exact figures. Paid plans share one weekly usage pool for Cursor's own models (Grok 4.7, Grok 4.6, Grok 4.5 and Composer 2.5). Plus is limited to those models, while Premium and above add Cloud Agents, Automations, Bugbot code review and Origin code hosting, and let you run Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-5.6 Sol or Gemini 3.1 Pro at their own API list price, paid from prepaid credit. Teams seats mirror the individual tiers and add SAML/OIDC SSO and usage analytics; Enterprise is custom-priced with pooled usage, SCIM and invoice billing. Subscribers who joined before the bundle stay on what Cursor's docs call legacy plans, which keep working unchanged. Privacy Mode with Zero Data Retention terms is available on all plans; neither Cursor nor its LLM providers train on customer code in Privacy Mode.
Cursor's primary weakness is context at scale: repositories with hundreds of thousands of lines or more force the AI to make tradeoffs on what to include in context, sometimes choosing wrong. AI operations increase CPU and memory usage noticeably, and latency spikes are common on large codebase tasks. Anysphere does not currently sign HIPAA BAAs, making Cursor unsuitable for healthcare organizations handling PHI. Developers who want a terminal-first agent will find Claude Code a cleaner fit, those who want a lighter editor can try Windsurf, and teams that want an agent to own whole tickets should compare Devin. The bundle is also a cost: Cursor now comes with Grok and X features some buyers will never use, and Claude, GPT and Gemini usage is billed on top of the plan price.
On August 14, 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, after exercising an option agreement from April 2026. As part of the deal, Cursor joined SpaceX's SpaceXAI division, gaining access to SpaceX's large GPU fleet; Anysphere's prior $29.3 billion Series D valuation from November 2025 reflects its value before the deal closed. Version control support also expanded in 2026: GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps joined the existing GitHub integration on July 29, 2026, alongside a new iPad app and Cursor Origin, a self-hosted code-hosting product launched August 17, 2026.
Further reading on Hokai: what Cursor is actually for, the best AI coding assistants of 2026, and Cursor Composer 2 against Claude Code. Model makers whose models run inside Cursor include Anthropic, OpenAI and Google; the repository integrations are built with GitHub among others.
Pricing
Cursor has five self-serve tiers plus Teams and Enterprise. Free is $0 with limited Agent and Chat requests. Plus is $8/mo and covers Cursor's own models only (Grok 4.7, 4.6, 4.5 and Composer 2.5) at fixed settings.
Premium is $30/mo with 4x Plus usage, Super is $100/mo with 15x, and Ultra is $200/mo with 50x. Annual billing is $80/yr for Plus, $300/yr for Premium, $1,000/yr for Super and $2,000/yr for Ultra, about 17% below monthly. Usage is one weekly pool shared across Cursor and Grok, refreshed weekly.
Third-party models such as Claude Opus 5.5 or GPT-5.6 Sol are available from Premium up at API list price, paid from prepaid credit, and are not drawn from the pool. Teams seats are $30, $100 or $200 per user per month, matching the individual tier, and Enterprise is custom with pooled usage, SCIM and invoice billing. Beyond the pool, Composer 2.5 costs $0.50 per million input and $2.50 per million output tokens, or $3.00 and $15.00 for the Fast variant.
The older Pro, Pro+, Ultra, Start and Teams Standard and Premium plans are legacy plans that keep working. Prices exclude tax.
| Tier | Monthly price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | Limited Agent requests, Limited Chat requests |
| Plus | $8/mo | Cursor models only: Grok 4.7, 4.6, 4.5 and Composer 2.5, Shared weekly usage pool, Grok Chat, Voice, Imagine, Build and API access |
| Premium | $30/mo | 4x Plus usage, Cloud Agents and Automations, Bugbot pull-request reviews and Origin repo hosting, Third-party models at API list price |
| Teams | $30/mo | $30, $100 or $200 per seat per month, matching the seat tier, SAML/OIDC SSO, usage analytics, centralized billing |
| Super | $100/mo | 15x Plus usage, Everything in Premium, Priority model access at peak times |
| Ultra | $200/mo | 50x Plus usage, Everything in Super, Earliest access to new products and models |
| Enterprise | Custom | Pooled usage, SCIM, invoice/PO billing, audit logs and granular spend controls |
Feature Comparison by Tier
| Feature | Free | Plus | Premium | Super | Ultra | Teams |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base monthly price | Free | $8 | $30 | $100 | $200 | $30+/user |
| Included usage | Limited | Base | 4x Plus | 15x Plus | 50x Plus | 4-50x Plus |
| Agent | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cloud Agents and Automations | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bugbot code review | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Third-party models at API list price | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Priority model access at peak times | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| SAML/OIDC SSO and usage analytics | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
Key Features
- Agent Mode: Given a plain-language instruction, Cursor plans the change, edits every file it touches, runs the necessary shell commands, installs any missing dependencies, and keeps retrying until the test suite is green, all without further prompting.
- Tab Completion: Project-aware multi-line autocomplete that predicts the next 3 lines based on surrounding context, running at sub-250ms latency, meaningfully faster than GitHub Copilot.
- Cursor Automations (v3.8, June 2026): Always-on background agents that automate repetitive tasks on schedule. Use /automate to describe a workflow in plain language; agents respond to GitHub and Slack triggers, and cloud agents can now use computer use to produce demos or artifacts of their work.
- Cloud Agents & Fast Environments: Agents run on Cursor's cloud infrastructure rather than the local machine, supporting up to 10 parallel workers per user. Version 3.7 (June 2026) delivers cloud environments that spin up in under 10 minutes via reusable snapshots, with /in-cloud for isolated subagents and a smooth local-to-cloud session handoff.
- Composer (Multi-File Editing): Edits many files simultaneously with coordinated changes, presenting visual diffs to review file by file, trained with large-scale reinforcement learning over prior versions.
- Native MCP Integration: Connects agents directly to GitHub, Linear, Jira, Postgres, Supabase, and Slack via Model Context Protocol, letting agents open issues, query schemas, and file PRs without leaving the IDE.
- Privacy Mode with Zero Data Retention: Enabling Privacy Mode activates contractual ZDR terms with all LLM providers so no customer code is stored or used for training, and it can be turned on in settings on any plan.
- Cursor Router (Auto Mode): Cursor Router launched July 22, 2026, an intelligent model router that classifies each request by complexity and domain and routes it to the right model automatically. Trained on 600,000+ live requests, Cursor says it delivers frontier-quality results at lower cost, with Intelligence, Balance, and Cost modes available across desktop, web, iOS, CLI, and SDK.
- Cursor Origin & Expanded Version Control: Cursor Origin, a self-hosted code-hosting platform with repo management and CI integrations for Vercel, Depot, and Buildkite, launched August 17, 2026; native GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps support joined GitHub on July 29, 2026, both with Cloud Agents and Bugbot.
- Cursor Projects: Launched September 10, 2026: a coordinator agent takes on a full feature, migration, or app, delegates the work to many subagents running in parallel on their own cloud machines, and maintains a shared context file across the project so lessons one agent learns carry to the next.
- Rollouts, Security Review & Self-Hosted Machines: Launched September 2-23, 2026 on Teams and Enterprise: Rollouts writes a monitoring plan per pull request and reports verified-healthy, regression-detected, or inconclusive per deploy environment; Security Review posts one PR comment flagging exploitable bugs (injection, auth bypass, secrets); self-hosted machines let cloud agents execute entirely on your own infrastructure via dynamic worker pools.
Pros
- Cursor is one of the most widely adopted AI code editors among large enterprise engineering teams, including 20,000+ developers at Salesforce alone.
- Tab completions respond faster than GitHub Copilot, and Agent Mode reduces boilerplate and feature-scaffolding tasks from an afternoon to minutes.
- Every VS Code extension, theme, and keybinding migrates in one click, eliminating the learning curve and tool switching cost entirely.
Cons
- Large codebases hit context limits, forcing the AI to choose what to include and sometimes choosing wrong, producing confident but incorrect edits.
- As of August 2026, Anysphere was acquired by SpaceX and now operates inside the SpaceXAI division; enterprises that prefer editor vendors independent of a large aerospace and AI conglomerate may want to watch how product priorities evolve over time.
- Anysphere does not sign HIPAA Business Associate Agreements, making Cursor unsuitable for any healthcare organization handling Protected Health Information.
Product Information
- Cloud
- Yes
- Self-Hosted
- Yes
- On-Premise
- No
- Languages
- English
- Training
- Documentation, Changelog, Community Discord
Data Handling
- Training-data policy
- Does not train on customer code. Privacy Mode enables contractual Zero Data Retention terms with all LLM providers (Anthropic, OpenAI) so no code is stored or used for training.
- Data retention
- Zero retention
- Compliance
- SOC 2 Type II · GDPR · CCPA · Zero Data Retention (Privacy Mode)
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Cursor cost per month in 2026?
Cursor has five self-serve tiers: Free at $0, Plus at $8, Premium at $30, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200 a month, billed annually at $80, $300, $1,000 and $2,000 a year for the four paid plans. Premium gives 4x Plus usage, Super 15x and Ultra 50x, all drawn from one weekly pool. For organizations, a Teams seat is priced at the same level as one of those individual tiers, and Enterprise is quoted by sales. Third-party models such as Claude and GPT are billed separately at API list price from prepaid credit.
Is Cursor free?
Yes, there is a Free plan at $0 with limited Agent requests and limited Chat requests. It leaves out Cloud Agents, Automations, Bugbot code review, Origin code hosting and third-party models, which start at Premium. Plus at $8 a month is the cheapest paid step, and it covers only Cursor's own Grok and Composer models. Privacy Mode can be switched on in settings on any plan.
What are the best Cursor alternatives?
Windsurf, Claude Code and Devin are the three closest competitors listed on hokai. Windsurf runs Cognition's Cascade agent inside a lighter, VS Code-based editor, which suits developers who want a similar experience with a different vendor behind it. Claude Code skips the IDE entirely in favor of a terminal-native agent loop for developers who don't want to switch editors. Devin goes a step further than either, taking on whole tickets autonomously rather than acting as a copilot a developer drives file by file.
Cursor or Windsurf: which is better?
Cursor has the deeper agent surface: Cursor Projects can run a coordinator across many parallel subagents, and Cloud Agents, Rollouts and Security Review only exist on its side. Windsurf answers with Cascade, a comparably capable single agent, and Codemaps for visual codebase navigation, in a lighter VS Code-based editor. Teams that want the widest agent toolkit and are comfortable with SpaceX ownership should pick Cursor; teams that prefer a simpler, independently run IDE should pick Windsurf.
How do I get started with Cursor?
Downloading Cursor and signing in takes a couple of minutes, and every existing VS Code theme, keybinding and extension carries over with no reconfiguration. New users can type a plain-language instruction into Agent Mode on their first file and see a working multi-file change within minutes. Teams adopting SSO need a Teams seat set up by an admin first, and SCIM or invoice billing needs Enterprise, which typically takes an afternoon rather than minutes.
Top Alternatives
- Windsurf: Choose Windsurf if you want Cognition's Cascade agent and Codemaps in a lighter, VS Code-based IDE.
- Claude Code: Pick Claude Code if you want a terminal-native agent loop with no editor to switch into.
- Devin: Pick Devin if you want an autonomous engineer that owns tickets end-to-end rather than an IDE copilot you drive yourself.
Hokai guides covering Cursor
- Cursor Composer 2.5 vs. Claude Code: Which AI Coding Agent Should You Use in 2026?: Cursor Composer 2.5 vs Claude Code on October 2026 pricing: Cursor's new Grok-bundled plans, Claude's 5.5 models, token costs and who should pick which.
- Best AI Coding Assistants in 2026: Pick the Job, Not the Brand: Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Devin Desktop and Trae compared by job. Cursor moved to The X Subscription; Codex added GPT-6.1 Terra. Prices read 6 Nov 2026.
- Cursor Isn't Just an Editor Anymore: Cursor built its own git host, unattended agents and self-hosted execution in three weeks. Here is what that shift actually means for teams comparing editors.
- SpaceX Closed the $60 Billion Cursor Deal. Grok Build Now Leads With Grok 4.7.: SpaceX closed the $60B Cursor deal on August 14. Grok Build now leads with Grok 4.7 while Cursor keeps Composer 2.5 for cheap, fast everyday coding work.
- What Tabnine Is Actually For: Tricentis bought Tabnine on July 30, 2026, for its context engine, not its coding assistant business. Here is what that leaves unanswered for buyers today.
Also mentioned in
- Best Email APIs for AI Agents in 2026: Inbox or Webhook?: Six email APIs for AI agents compared: which give an agent a real inbox, what 10,000 emails each way cost, free-plan catches, retention and safety controls.