Cursor vs GitHub Copilot: Pricing, Agents And Privacy For 2027

If you write code for a living, the two names that come up first when you shop for an AI coding assistant are Cursor and GitHub Copilot. Solo developers compare them on price and model choice; engineering managers compare seat cost, admin controls and code privacy.

The short version: Cursor is a standalone, agent-first editor (now owned by SpaceX) that you move your whole workflow into, while GitHub Copilot is an assistant that plugs into the editors and GitHub workflow you already use. Both have changed a lot in 2026. Copilot moved to credit-based billing in June, and Cursor rebuilt its plans around its own Grok and Composer models after the SpaceX deal closed in August. This comparison uses the plans and terms published on each vendor’s site as of November 2026.

Cursor vs GitHub Copilot At A Glance

Factor	Cursor	GitHub Copilot
Product model	Standalone AI editor plus CLI, cloud agents and code review bot	Extension and agent across many IDEs, the terminal, GitHub.com and mobile
Free plan	Yes, limited agent and chat requests, no third-party models	Yes, 2,000 inline suggestions per month and limited chat and agent use
Individual paid plans	Plus $8, Premium $30, Super $100, Ultra $200 per month	Pro $10, Pro+ $39, Max $100 per month
Team pricing	Teams seats at $30, $100 or $200 per user per month; Enterprise custom	Business $19 and Enterprise $39 per user per month
How usage is metered	Weekly pool for Cursor models; third-party models billed at API list price	Monthly GitHub AI Credits ($0.01 each), pooled on Business and Enterprise
Models	Grok and Composer in the pool; Claude, GPT and Gemini on Premium and up at API cost	Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok and others, drawn from the same credits
Agents	Editor Agent, CLI, Cloud Agents, Bugbot code review	Agent mode in the IDE, Copilot CLI, cloud agent that opens pull requests, code review
Editor support	Cursor desktop app; JetBrains via the Agent Client Protocol on paid plans	VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode, Vim, Neovim, Zed, Eclipse
Training on your code	Not used for training when Privacy Mode is on	Business and Enterprise never; Free, Pro and Pro+ unless you opt out
Best for	Developers who want an agent-centric editor and heavy autonomous work	Teams standardized on GitHub who want low per-seat cost and broad IDE coverage

The Core Difference: A Place You Work vs A Layer You Add

Cursor asks you to change editors. Its desktop app is where the Agent, Tab completions, the Agents Window and Mission Control (a view for planning and running several tasks in parallel) all live. Cursor describes itself in its docs as “a coding agent for building ambitious software,” and the product has leaned harder into that description every release. You can reach Cursor’s agent from a terminal, from Slack and from JetBrains IDEs, but the full experience assumes you are sitting in Cursor.

GitHub Copilot works the other way around. It meets you in whatever editor you already use, and GitHub lists VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode, Vim, Neovim, Zed and Eclipse, plus a CLI, a desktop app, GitHub.com and GitHub Mobile. Its biggest advantage is not inside the editor at all. Because it is built into GitHub, a task can start as an issue, get picked up by an agent and come back as a pull request in the same place your team already reviews code.

The 2026 ownership and billing changes sharpen that split. Cursor, now part of SpaceX, steers paying users toward its own Grok and Composer models, which sit inside a weekly allowance, and charges third-party models such as Claude and GPT separately at API list price. Copilot, owned by Microsoft’s GitHub, treats every model as a draw on the same pool of AI Credits. If you mostly want one particular frontier model, that difference matters more than any feature checklist.

Pricing Compared

Both vendors moved away from simple request counts in 2026, so the sticker price is only half the story. What you really need to know is what the plan includes and how extra usage is charged.

Cursor Pricing

Cursor’s individual lineup has five tiers. Free costs nothing and includes limited agent and chat requests, with no third-party models. Plus is $8 per month ($80 per year) and covers Cursor’s own models only. Premium is $30 per month ($300 per year) with four times the Plus allowance and access to third-party models. Super is $100 per month ($1,000 per year) with 15 times the Plus allowance and priority model access at peak times. Ultra is $200 per month ($2,000 per year) with 50 times the Plus allowance and the earliest access to new products and models.

Each paid plan includes one weekly usage pool for Cursor models. According to Cursor’s pricing docs, that pool covers Grok 4.7, Grok 4.6, Grok 4.5 and Composer 2.5, and it is shared across the editor Agent, the CLI, Cloud Agents, Grok Bot and the Grok apps. The weekly refresh means one heavy day cannot burn a whole month. When the pool runs out you can wait for the reset, upgrade, or pay from prepaid credit at published token rates (for example $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens on Grok 4.7).

The detail many buyers miss: third-party models (Claude, GPT, Gemini and Muse Wonder) are not part of the pool at all. Cursor bills them at API list price from the first request, paid from prepaid credit. Cursor’s docs list Claude Sonnet 5.5 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, and Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 and $20. You can set a monthly additional usage limit and turn on Auto Top-up.

For organizations, Teams seats cost $30, $100 or $200 per user per month (Premium, Super or Ultra seats), and you can mix seat types on one team. Plus is not available for teams. Teams seats do not share pools, and eligible third-party model requests carry a Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million tokens on top of API pricing. Enterprise is custom priced and adds pooled usage, SCIM, granular spend controls and audit logs. Annual pricing for Teams is not published on the pricing pages.

GitHub Copilot Pricing

Since June 1, 2026, Copilot usage draws on GitHub AI Credits, which replaced the old premium request units. One credit is worth $0.01, and consumption is based on input, output and cached tokens at each model’s published API rate. Inline code completions and Next Edit Suggestions are still included on paid plans and do not use credits, which is a real advantage if most of your AI use is autocomplete.

The individual plans are Free, Pro, Pro+ and Max. Free costs nothing and includes 2,000 inline suggestions per month plus limited chat and agent use with automatic model selection. Pro is $10 per month with $10 in base credits plus a $5 flex allotment, for 1,500 credits in total. Pro+ is $39 per month with $39 in base credits plus $31 in flex, for 7,000 credits. Max is $100 per month with $100 in base credits plus $100 in flex, for 20,000 credits and priority access to premium models. GitHub notes that flex allotments “may change over time,” so treat that part of the allowance as variable. The plans page does not list annual prices.

For organizations, Copilot Business is $19 per seat per month with 1,900 credits per user, and Copilot Enterprise is $39 per seat per month with 3,900 credits per user. On both, credits are pooled across the organization, so light users subsidize heavy ones. Usage beyond the pool is charged at $0.01 per credit if an admin allows it. If not, Copilot pauses until the next cycle. Admins can set budgets at the enterprise, cost center and user levels.

What You Actually Pay

Take a ten-person product engineering team that wants agent features and access to Claude models.

On Copilot Business, the subscription is 10 x $19, or $190 per month, and the team gets a shared pool of 19,000 credits (worth $190 of model usage at published API rates). Autocomplete does not touch that pool. If the team uses Claude heavily in agent mode and exhausts the pool, each extra $100 of usage buys 10,000 more credits, and admins decide whether that spending is allowed. Moving to Copilot Enterprise doubles both the seat cost ($390) and the pool (39,000 credits).

On Cursor Teams, the minimum for third-party model access is a Premium seat, so the subscription is 10 x $30, or $300 per month. Each developer gets their own weekly pool for Grok and Composer, but every Claude request is billed separately at API list price plus the $0.25 per million token Cursor Token Rate. A team that is happy to work mostly in Grok and Composer gets a lot for $300. A team that insists on Claude for everything should budget the $300 in seats plus its full Claude token bill on top.

For a solo developer, the gap is smaller. Copilot Pro at $10 gives you completions and 1,500 credits for any supported model. Cursor Plus at $8 gives you a weekly allowance, but only for Cursor’s own models. To use Claude or GPT inside Cursor you need Premium at $30 plus API costs.

Agents and Autonomous Coding

Both products now sell themselves primarily on agents rather than autocomplete. They approach the job from different ends.

Cursor Agents

Cursor’s Agent is the center of the editor, backed by planning, debugging and a design mode in the docs. Cloud Agents run on their own machines to “build, test, and demo features end to end,” and Cursor says you can launch fleets of them to work in parallel for hours or days. You can also run them on self-hosted machines. Bugbot handles pull request review and is listed as included from the Premium plan up, and Cursor’s docs list integrations with GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps and Bitbucket. Cursor’s agent also takes requests in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Linear and Jira, and the newer Grok Bot can sign in to your tools and return finished work.

Cursor’s agent experience is the more opinionated of the two. If you are also weighing terminal-first agents, our Claude Code vs Cursor comparison covers that trade-off.

GitHub Copilot Agents

Copilot’s agent mode is available in supported IDEs on every plan, including Free. The bigger differentiator is Copilot in the cloud. You can assign an issue to Copilot and get a pull request back, with sessions that move between the web, mobile and local clients. GitHub’s docs say the newer cloud experience became available to all paid Copilot users on October 28, 2026, with a choice of cloud sandbox, GitHub Actions or a custom remote environment. Sessions on GitHub Actions are capped at 59 minutes, and that compute draws on your GitHub account allowance separately from AI Credits.

Pro+ and Max can also delegate tasks to third-party coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI Codex (listed as Preview on the plans page). Copilot CLI is included on all plans, and Copilot code review can check local changes before you open a pull request as well as review the pull request itself.

Models and Editor Experience

Cursor’s included pool now covers its own Composer model and the Grok family from its parent company. Those models are the only ones on the Plus plan. Claude, GPT, Gemini and Muse Wonder remain available from Premium up, but at API list price rather than inside your subscription. Cursor says requests are never downgraded in quality or speed when you hit limits; instead, you wait, upgrade or pay.

Copilot’s plans page lists a broad catalog across Anthropic (Haiku, Sonnet and Opus models), OpenAI GPT and Codex models, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Microsoft’s MAI-Code and Kimi. Free and Student plans are limited to automatic model selection, Pro gets a selection of models, and Pro+ and Max get premium models. All of it draws from one credit balance, so a cheaper model stretches your allowance further. Copilot also supports bring-your-own-key cloud providers and local models through Ollama and Foundry Local.

On the editor itself, Cursor offers a single, tightly designed environment with features like multi-agent views that a plugin cannot easily replicate. Copilot’s strength is that nobody on your team has to switch tools. A JetBrains shop, an Xcode iOS team and a Neovim holdout can all use the same subscription. Cursor reaches JetBrains users only through JetBrains’ AI Assistant and the Agent Client Protocol on a paid plan, which works but is not the full Cursor experience.

Team and Enterprise Controls

Cursor For Teams

Cursor Teams includes centralized billing, usage analytics, team-wide privacy settings, custom chat data retention, SAML and OIDC single sign-on, mixed seat types and a team marketplace for internal rules, skills and plugins. Admins set a monthly additional usage limit for the team and a default per-member limit. Enterprise adds invoice billing, SCIM, group-level settings and spend limits, controls over repositories, models and MCP servers, auto-run, browser and network controls, audit logs, service accounts and priority support. Cursor’s security page lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and ISO/IEC 42001:2023, plus customer-managed encryption keys and MDM deployment.

Copilot For Business And Enterprise

Copilot Business and Enterprise are managed by your GitHub administrator, with pooled credits, budgets at several levels and the option to block paid overage entirely. Organization plans include SAML SSO, user management on GitHub.com, usage metrics and IP indemnity, none of which come with individual plans. GitHub says you are entitled to IP indemnification for unmodified suggestions when Copilot’s public code filter is enabled. Enterprise includes everything in Business plus more credits per seat and priority model access. For companies already paying for GitHub Enterprise Cloud, Copilot slots into identity, policy and audit tooling they already run, which is hard for any outside editor to match.

Privacy and Data Use

Cursor’s protection depends on Privacy Mode. With it on, Cursor says customer data will not be used for training, and it holds zero data retention agreements with its model providers (with an exception for prompts that trigger abuse detection). Models that are not covered by zero retention are labeled or require an admin to opt in. With Privacy Mode off, Cursor may store and use codebase data, prompts and code snippets to improve its features and train its models. Team admins can enforce Privacy Mode for everyone. Cursor’s data use page does not state which default applies to each plan, so individuals should check the setting on day one. It also does not spell out how data flows to SpaceXAI beyond linking to that provider’s own policy.

Copilot draws a hard line by plan. GitHub states that it does not use Copilot Business or Enterprise data to train its models. From April 24, 2026, however, GitHub may use interaction data from Copilot Free, Pro and Pro+ users (inputs, outputs, code snippets and context) for model training unless the user opts out in their Copilot settings. Individual developers working on client code should change that setting before they start.

Ease of Adoption

Copilot is the easier rollout for most companies. There is no new editor to standardize, procurement often already has a GitHub contract, and the per-seat price is lower. Developers keep their themes, keybindings and extensions because nothing about their editor changes.

Cursor asks for more change but rewards developers who lean in. Teams that adopt it usually do so because a group of engineers already prefers it and pushes it upward. If the editor switch is the sticking point, or you want to see what else sits in this category, our list of the best Cursor alternatives covers the other options. And if your shortlist includes app builders for non-developers rather than coding tools, the Cursor vs Lovable breakdown explains where that line falls.

Which Should You Choose

Choose Cursor If…

• You want an editor built around agents, with parallel tasks, long-running cloud agents and Mission Control in one place.
• You are comfortable doing most of your work in Grok and Composer, which keeps costs inside the weekly pool.
• Your developers are willing to standardize on one editor to get the full agent experience.
• You are a heavy individual user who values a weekly refresh over a monthly one.

Choose GitHub Copilot If…

• Your team uses a mix of editors, especially JetBrains, Visual Studio, Xcode or Neovim.
• Your code lives on GitHub and you want issue-to-pull-request agents inside the review process you already have.
• You want one credit balance across Claude, GPT, Gemini and other models, with unlimited completions on top.
• Seat cost, pooled usage, IP indemnity and a clear no-training commitment on business plans matter more than editor polish.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Cursor Better Than GitHub Copilot?

Neither is better for everyone. Cursor offers the more integrated agent-first editor, while Copilot offers broader IDE support, tighter GitHub integration and lower team pricing. The right answer depends on whether your team will switch editors and which models you rely on.

Can I Use Claude in Cursor and GitHub Copilot?

Yes, with different billing. In Cursor, Claude models require the Premium plan or higher and are billed at API list price from prepaid credit, outside the weekly pool. In Copilot, Claude models draw from the same monthly AI Credits as every other model.

Does GitHub Copilot Still Use Premium Requests?

No. Since June 1, 2026, premium request units have been replaced by GitHub AI Credits, worth $0.01 each and consumed based on tokens at each model’s API rate. Inline completions and Next Edit Suggestions on paid plans do not use credits.

Who Owns Cursor Now?

Cursor announced on August 14, 2026 that it had officially been acquired by SpaceX. The company says the deal gives it access to more compute to build stronger and cheaper models. Its paid plans now center on Grok and Composer models.

Do Cursor or Copilot Train on My Code?

Cursor does not train on your data when Privacy Mode is enabled, and team admins can enforce it. GitHub does not train on Copilot Business or Enterprise data, but may use interaction data from Free, Pro and Pro+ users unless they opt out in their Copilot settings.

Is There a Free Version of Cursor or GitHub Copilot?

Both have free plans. Cursor Free includes limited agent and chat requests without third-party models. Copilot Free includes 2,000 inline suggestions a month, limited chat and agent use, and automatic model selection.

Conclusion

Cursor vs GitHub Copilot is really a choice between changing where you work and improving how you already work. Cursor gives developers who want to delegate big chunks of work a purpose-built editor, cloud agents that run for hours and a generous weekly pool, as long as they are happy with Grok and Composer for most tasks. Its pricing gets expensive quickly for teams that want Claude or GPT as their default.

GitHub Copilot is the safer default for organizations: lower seat prices, pooled credits, wide editor support, issue-to-pull-request agents on GitHub and clear data commitments on its business plans. Whichever you pick, check the current plan pages before you buy. Both vendors rewrote their pricing in 2026, and GitHub says its flex allotments can change at any time.