Cursor

Cursor — VS Code fork with a real codebase index, background cloud agents and a CLI. Cursor is a VS Code fork that treats agentic editing as the primary interaction rather than an extension bolted on. It maintains a genuine embeddings index of your codebase, which shows on large repos where grep-based harnesses flounder. Background agents run on Cursor's infrastructure and open pull requests, a CLI covers headless use, and an in-house model handles the fast path. Pricing is a subscription with usage-based spend above the included amount. Built by Anysphere. Founded 2022. Series C+. Licensed Proprietary.

We track it in 1 comparison — Coding agents — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 16 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it wins.

• Opens PRs — Yes, which only 6 of 16 tools here manage.
• Background agents — Yes, which only 5 of 16 tools here manage.
• Hooks — Yes, which only 3 of 10 tools here manage.
• Repo indexing — embeddings index, 3rd of 16.

Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.

Where it gives ground.

• Local models — No. Codex CLI records Yes.
• Licence — proprietary, 10th of 15. Codex CLI records Apache-2.0.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 23 of 26 tracked fields carry a value for Cursor, and 5 of those cite a document you can open. Last verified 2026-01-15. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is Aider. Cursor is ahead on Opens PRs (Yes against No) and MCP (Yes against No). Aider takes Licence (Apache-2.0 against proprietary) and Local models (Yes against No). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Cursor alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Company

Anysphere

Founded

2022

Funding

Series C+

Licence

Proprietary

Fields we track

23 of 26

Last verified

2026-01-15

A real persistent codebase index inside the editor you review in, which is exactly what a million-line monorepo needs and what grep-based harnesses cannot fake. It is not the only index here — Windsurf and Kilo Code embed too, and Copilot and Devin read an index alongside live search — but it is the best-integrated one. You pay for it in lock-in: the index, the gateway and the agent identity are all Cursor's, and BYOK is a second-class path.

Opens PRs

●Yes1st of 16

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

Background agents

●Yes1st of 16

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

Local models

○No11th of 16

Inferred

Hooks

●Yes1st of 10

Community-reported

Entry price

$20 /seat/mo13th of 16

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-01-15source

Model breadth

multi-vendor8th of 16

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

Repo indexing

embeddings index3rd of 16

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-01-15source

Permissions

allowlist + OS sandbox1st of 16

Community-reported

Cursor is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• Large monorepos where agentic grep runs out of context before it finds anything.
• Teams who want to review agentic diffs in an editor rather than a terminal.
• Shops wanting background PR-opening agents without wiring up CI.
• Opens PRs is your binding constraint. Cursor records Yes, which only 6 of the 16 tools in the Coding agents roster do. We define that field as a first-class path to a pull request: a built-in command, a vendor-published GitHub App with its own identity, or a hosted runner.
• Background agents is your binding constraint. Cursor records Yes, which only 5 of the 16 tools in the Coding agents roster do. We define that field as can you fire off a task that keeps running once the client is closed — on vendor infrastructure or a detached local runner — and check back later?
• Hooks is your binding constraint. Cursor records Yes, which only 3 of the 10 tools in the Coding agents roster do.
• Repo indexing is your binding constraint. Cursor records embeddings index, 3rd of 16 in the Coding agents roster.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• Local models. Cursor records No on the Coding agents table. Codex CLI records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Licence. Cursor records proprietary, 10th of 15 in the Coding agents roster. Codex CLI records Apache-2.0 on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 3 of the 26 fields we track for Cursor are still blank: GitHub stars, Terminal-Bench and Bench model. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.