Cursor vs Copilot: $10 Copilot beats $30 Cursor on Claude

What do Cursor and Copilot cost at each tier?

Copilot costs $0, $10, $39 or $100 a month, and Cursor costs $0, $8, $30, $100 or $200. We read every row on 8 November 2026 from GitHub's Copilot plans page and plans docs, and from Cursor's pricing page and pricing docs. US prices, before tax:

Copilot's cheapest plan with Claude in it is $10, and Cursor's is $30. Cursor wins on yearly billing. Its yearly prices work out to $6.67, $25, $83.33 and $166.67 a month, and GitHub no longer shows one at all. Its April changelog says annual Pro and Pro+ plans run until they expire, and then those users move to Copilot Free.

How much Claude and GPT usage does each plan include?

Copilot includes $15 to $200 of Claude, GPT and Gemini usage a month, and Cursor includes none. GitHub bills that usage in AI credits, and its plans page says "1 AI credit = $0.01 USD." The changelog says usage is priced "based on token consumption" at each model's published API rate. Cursor's docs say "Third-party models like Claude, GPT, and Gemini aren't part of the included pool."

The two companies charge the same rate for the same model. GitHub's model price list and Cursor's model list, both read on 8 November 2026, give Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 in, $0.20 cached and $20 out per million tokens. They match on Claude Sonnet 5.5 ($2 and $10) and Grok 4.7 ($2 and $6) too. Same tokens, same price. So the thing you're really choosing between is what the plan fee buys you before the first token is billed:

One caveat on Copilot. The base credits equal the fee, and the rest is a "flex allotment" that GitHub's billing docs describe as "a variable part of your included usage." The plans page adds: "Flex allotments may change over time." Cursor's plans buy something else, a weekly pool of Grok and Composer that Cursor doesn't price in dollars. Here's the monthly bill as Claude and GPT use grows:

Pro is the cheapest Copilot plan up to $44 of usage. Pro+ is cheapest from $44 to $131, and Max past that. At every point on the chart, Cursor Premium costs at least $20 more than the best Copilot plan, and $35 more once you pass $15 of usage.

What does a typical month of Cursor or Copilot cost?

A month with $50 of Claude Opus 5.5 costs $39 on Copilot Pro+ and $80 on Cursor Premium. Say you send 5 million input tokens and get 1.5 million output tokens back, with no caching. At $4 and $20 per million, that's 5 × $4 + 1.5 × $20 = $50. Here's the arithmetic for each plan:

Over a year, Pro+ comes to $468 and Cursor Premium to $960 on monthly billing. That's a $492 gap. It's not small. The math flips if most of your work runs on Grok 4.7 or Composer 2.5, since those come out of Cursor's pool at no extra charge. On Copilot, Grok 4.7 spends credits like any other model. Completions don't touch Copilot's credits at all. GitHub says "Code completions and next edit suggestions are not billed in AI credits."

Which models can Cursor and Copilot use?

Copilot has OpenAI's GPT-6 models and Cursor doesn't, while Cursor has its own Composer 2.5 and Copilot doesn't. GitHub's price list, read on 8 November 2026, includes GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6.1 Terra. Cursor's list stops at GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna. So the newest OpenAI model you can buy in Cursor costs $4 in and $20 out, and GPT-6.1 Sol in Copilot costs $2 and $10. Even that $4 is a sale price. Cursor marks it "Promotional pricing through November 21, 2026."

Both of them carry Claude, Gemini and Grok, so for those three it comes down to what the plan includes. Copilot adds Microsoft's MAI-Code-1.1-Flash at $0.20 in and $1.20 out. Cursor adds models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, Z.ai and Meta. If one lab's model is the reason you're paying, check both lists first. For which model codes best right now, see best AI for coding.

What is each one best at?

Cursor is best as an AI editor you switch to, and Copilot is best inside the editor you already use. Cursor is its own app, so if you pick it, you're moving your work into it and you'll be doing most of your coding there from then on. Its docs call Tab "Cursor's AI-powered autocomplete," and its weekly pool covers the editor Agent, the Cursor CLI and Cloud Agents. It refreshes weekly, and Cursor's pricing page puts it this way: "one heavy day never wipes out your whole month."

Copilot plugs into VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode and Eclipse, per GitHub's IDE quickstart. It also lives on GitHub itself. GitHub's plans page says: "Assign work to Copilot and it creates a pull request." Its plan table marks third-party agents as included on Pro+ and Max. If your team reviews code on GitHub, Copilot is already there. That counts for a lot.

Who should pick Cursor and who should pick Copilot?

Pick Copilot if you want Claude or GPT for the least money, and pick Cursor if you want Grok or Composer in a dedicated editor. Here are the rules we'd use, from the prices above:

Cursor loses on Claude, GPT and Gemini, because it includes none of their usage and charges a $30 plan first. Copilot loses on predictability: its flex credits can change, and it has no yearly plan to lock a price.

What do Cursor and Copilot cost for a team?

A Copilot Business seat costs $19 a month with $19 of AI credits, and a Cursor Teams seat costs at least $30 with none for third-party models. Copilot Enterprise costs $39 a seat with $39 of credits. Cursor adds a $0.25 per million token Cursor Token Rate on eligible third-party requests, and its docs say "Plus isn't available for teams." For ten developers:

GitHub gave existing Business and Enterprise customers more credits for June, July and August 2026, at $30 and $70 a seat. That promotion has ended, per the changelog's own dates. So if you're pricing a team today, you should budget on the $19 and $39 of credits that come with each seat, and plan for anything your developers use past that to show up on the bill. Nothing else is free.

What do Cursor and Copilot cost next to the rest of your AI stack?

A stack of Cursor Premium, ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro costs $70 a month, and the same stack with Copilot Pro costs $50. ChatGPT Plus is $20 on OpenAI's pricing page, and Claude Pro is $20 on Anthropic's pricing page, both read 8 November 2026. Both of those include an agent, Codex and Claude Code, so if you use either one, keep that plan.

Whizi, which publishes this page, can cut the chat side only. It's one chat app with Claude, GPT and Gemini, plus pictures, video and music, and Whizi Pro costs $29.99 a month for 2,500 credits. It has no coding agent, no editor plugin and no API. So keep Copilot or Cursor for the code. If you pay for ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro just to chat, Copilot Pro plus Whizi Pro comes to $10 plus $29.99. The cheapest way to use Claude and GPT runs the rest of that math.