Amp vs Cursor

Best for

• Terminal and cloud agent workflows
• Teams reviewing model routing and permissions
• Cross-device threads with explicit visibility controls

Watch out

Hobby is free client access/BYOK or linked subscriptions with paid Orbs; Individual Megawatt is $20/month with 45,000 weighted Orb minutes; Teams adds no extra charge and Enterprise is custom. Gigawatt price and exact included agent allowance are not established by these public pages. Education is $10/month for eligible students/teachers; the captured page does not confirm an extra $10 credit grant. Non-enterprise paid-credit inference has no provider API markup; non-model tools can also charge credits, purchased credits expire after 12 months, and included usage does not roll over. Orbs bill by minute: a1 sizes $0.08–$2.13/hour, largest restricted, and pause after both 5 minutes without agent work and 20 minutes without interaction; idle services do not themselves keep an Orb awake. Mode routing can be pinned: ChatGPT linking alone does not convert every role, and ultra keeps Amp routing. Tools require no approval by default; custom policy plugins are the current control, not an assumed legacy permission mode. Workspace-project threads default shared; personal/no-project threads private, subject to admin controls. Amp-managed inference MDR has safety/legal/model exceptions, sometimes up to 30 days, and does not cover thread storage. Training is off absent explicit opt-in; Enterprise cannot enable it. BYOK/consumer-subscription terms are separate, and Fable BYOK requires retained-data workspace access. CLI docs say Windows via WSL while a native PowerShell installer exists; confirm installed-client support. Sources: https://ampcode.com/docs/pricing; https://ampcode.com/docs/the-dial; https://ampcode.com/docs/tools; https://ampcode.com/docs/orbs/sizes-and-costs; https://ampcode.com/security.

Best for

• Daily feature work
• Multi-file edits in-editor
• Teams already on VS Code

Watch out

SpaceX-owned Cursor currently prices Hobby free, Pro $20/month, Pro+ $60, Ultra $200, Teams Standard $40/user/month and Premium $120 (5x Standard Agent limits). India-only Start is ₹649/month including tax, restricted to Cursor Models and without the Other Models pool or on-demand usage. Individual plans have separate monthly Cursor Models and Other Models pools; third-party models are charged at API rates. Teams/Enterprise add $0.25/MTok on third-party direct, Auto and BYOK usage, not first-party models. Eligible US-only residency adds a 10% model-price uplift. Old $20/$70/$400 included-dollar figures are not currently established (https://cursor.com/pricing; https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing). OpenAI's August 28 notice proposes a November 12, 2026 (2026-11-12) wind-down; it does not prove OpenAI models have already been removed (https://openai.com/index/our-decision-on-cursor-following-its-acquisition-by-spacex/). Privacy Mode prevents training, subject to abuse-investigation retention and explicitly approved non-ZDR models such as Fable; BYOK requests still use Cursor's backend. Current Instant Grep builds/searches its index locally without storing code embeddings, but opened file context can still reach model providers. Ignore rules do not block terminal or MCP reads (https://cursor.com/data-use; https://cursor.com/docs/context/codebase-indexing; https://cursor.com/docs/reference/ignore-file). The retained 65.7% benchmark is an April 19 publisher compilation for Background Agent with Sonnet 4.6, not a current-product measurement or an independently reproduced official submission. CLI/cloud availability means switching IDE is optional (https://cursor.com/docs/cli/overview; https://cursor.com/blog/joining-spacex).