Cursor vs GitHub Copilot
Cursor (Anysphere (owned by SpaceX)) and GitHub Copilot (GitHub (Microsoft)) side by side on public data, as of Oct 6, 2026.
Side-by-side numbers
| Metric | Cursor | GitHub Copilot |
|---|---|---|
| Pulse Score | 71 | 70 |
| Overall rank | #8 | #9 |
| Downloads, last 7 days | — | — |
| Downloads, 7-day change | — | — |
| Downloads, 30-day change | — | — |
| VS Code installs | — | 78.6M |
| Marketplace rating | — | 2.8 / 5 (395) |
| GitHub stars | 33.3K | — |
| Homebrew installs, 30 days | 2,963 | — |
| Hacker News mentions, 30 days | 204 | 75 |
| Latest stable release | — | — |
| Stable releases, 90 days | ||
| Terminal-Bench (best run) | — | — |
| Price | Free + $20/mo | Free + $10/mo |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| First released | March 2023 | June 2021 |
| Interfaces | Desktop IDE, CLI, Web, Mobile, Slack, GitHub, Linear, API/SDK | IDE plugin, CLI, Web, Mobile, Desktop app, Slack, GitHub |
| Models | Models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, SpaceXAI (Grok 4.7/4.6/4.5) and Meta (Muse Spark), plus Cursor's own Composer 2.5. | Selectable models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others (Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol were added in Sept 2026); Pro+ and Max can also delegate tasks to third-party agents such as Claude and OpenAI Codex. |
Trends
Cursor
AI coding editor and agent platform with a desktop app, a CLI, web and mobile agents, and cloud agents that run tasks in remote environments. It offers models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, SpaceXAI (Grok) and Meta alongside its own Composer models.
Pricing: Hobby is free; Pro $20/mo, Pro Plus $60/mo, Ultra $200/mo; Teams $40/user/mo (Standard) or $120/user/mo (Premium); Enterprise is custom; a Start plan for India costs INR 649/mo. Paid plans include usage pools billed at model API rates with on-demand overage.
GitHub Copilot
AI coding assistant from GitHub offering completions, chat and agent mode in IDEs, a terminal CLI, a desktop app and a cloud agent that works on assigned tasks in the background and opens pull requests. Models from several providers can be selected.
Pricing: Free; Pro $10/mo; Pro+ $39/mo; Max $100/mo; Business $19/seat/mo; Enterprise $39/seat/mo; free for verified students. Plans include monthly GitHub AI Credits (Pro 1,500, Pro+ 7,000, Max 20,000 credits) that chat, agent mode, the cloud agent, CLI and code review draw on.