Cursor vs GitHub Copilot

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).

Best for

• Mixed-editor teams
• Enterprise rollout
• Procurement-led purchases

Watch out

Plans: Free and Student use automatic model selection; Pro $10/month includes 1,500 AI Credits (1,000 base + 500 flex), Pro+ $39 includes 7,000 (3,900 + 3,100), Max $100 includes 20,000 (10,000 + 10,000), Business $19/user/month includes 1,900 pooled credits and Enterprise $39 includes 3,900 pooled credits. Flex allotments can change. One credit is $0.01; cost depends on model and tokens, not a fixed charge per message. Paid completions and next-edit suggestions do not consume credits. Included individual credits reset on the first of each month UTC and do not roll over. Existing annual-plan exceptions must be checked against the account's billing terms (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/get-started/plans; https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/billing-for-individuals). All plans include CLI and the desktop app, but organisation policies can disable them separately; Neovim is completion-only and Free code review is VS Code Review selection, not GitHub PR review. Current supported models include Sonnet 5.5, Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol, Astra/Luna, Grok 4.7, Kimi K3, Fable 5.1 and MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, subject to surface/plan availability. GitHub schedules Opus 4.7, Gemini 3.5/3.6 Flash and Kimi K2.7 Code for retirement on October 2, 2026; this is a dated notice, not observed removal from every account (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/ai-models/supported-models). Individual Free/Pro/Pro+/Max interactions may be used for training unless opted out; Business/Enterprise data is not used for training without customer permission. Content exclusion does not apply to IDE Edit or Agent mode and can miss symlinks or indirect semantic context (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/context/content-exclusion; https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/manage-your-account/managing-copilot-policies-as-an-individual-subscriber). Fable models retain data by default; qualified enterprise ZDR exemptions run through the end of 2026 and require separate approval, configuration and model enablement (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/ai-models/model-hosting). Verify model-specific policy before private-code use.