I’ve been comparing these two AI coding tools and I’m confused about the pricing. Here’s what I found:
Cost breakdown
Cursor Pro: $20 monthly but you only get 500 premium requests, then extra fees kick in
GitHub Copilot Pro: $10 monthly with unlimited usage under fair use terms
I’ve seen people mention bills over $40 with Cursor when they go over limits
Features they both have
Code auto-completion
AI chat for help with coding
Automated coding agents
Understanding your entire project
Recent updates
GitHub Copilot added agent functionality to VSCode recently. This was Cursor’s main advantage before, but now they’re basically the same.
My thoughts
I can’t figure out why I’d pay twice as much for Cursor when Copilot does the same stuff for half the price. The only reason would be if you really like Cursor’s editor interface.
Has anyone used both? Are there any Cursor features that make it worth the extra money? I’m trying to decide which one to subscribe to.
I switched from Cursor to Copilot about three months ago after getting burned by unexpected overage charges. The breaking point was when I hit a complex refactoring project and blew through my monthly allowance in two weeks, ending up with a $65 bill. What really sealed the deal was discovering that Copilot’s context awareness has improved significantly since their last major update. The code suggestions are nearly identical in quality now, and the integration with GitHub repositories gives it a slight edge when working with version control. The unlimited usage model just makes more sense for professional development work where you cannot predict your monthly AI assistance needs.
Been testing both extensively over the past few months and noticed something interesting about performance differences. While the feature sets look identical on paper, Cursor actually handles larger codebases more smoothly in my experience. The editor feels more responsive when working with projects over 100k lines of code, and their AI seems better at maintaining context across multiple files during longer coding sessions. That said, the pricing model is absolutely brutal if you’re a heavy user. I ended up sticking with Copilot purely for economic reasons, even though I preferred Cursor’s interface and performance. The reality is that for most developers, the quality difference isn’t significant enough to justify paying double, especially when those overage charges can spiral quickly during intensive development periods.
honestly, copilot’s been way more reliable for me lately. cursor used to be faster but now there hitting you with usage caps that make no sense when your coding professionally. the 500 request limit sounds generous until you realize how quick you burn thru it during debugging sessions.