Cursor vs Copilot

Choose Cursor if you want an AI-first editor built around multi-file, agentic coding and deep codebase awareness, and choose GitHub Copilot if you want affordable, lightweight AI assistance that lives inside the IDE you already use. Cursor is a standalone VS Code fork at $20/mo whose Composer agent can plan and edit across many files at once, making it the favorite of developers doing heavy refactors and feature work. GitHub Copilot is a plugin (for VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, Visual Studio, and more) at $10/mo, with the deepest GitHub integration and the lowest cost of entry. Both now let you pick between frontier models like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT family, so the real decision is workflow and budget, not raw model access. For most solo and team developers in 2026, Copilot is the safe, cheap default while Cursor is the productivity upgrade you pay extra for when agentic editing matters.