Cursor vs Zed
Cursor (Anysphere (owned by SpaceX)) and Zed (Zed Industries) side by side on public data, as of Oct 6, 2026.
Zed has 2.7x the GitHub stars of Cursor (91.3K against 33.3K). Zed shipped 23 stable releases in the past 90 days.
Side-by-side numbers
| Metric | Cursor | Zed |
|---|---|---|
| Pulse Score | 71 | 59 |
| Overall rank | #8 | #19 |
| Downloads, last 7 days | — | — |
| Downloads, 7-day change | — | — |
| Downloads, 30-day change | — | — |
| VS Code installs | — | — |
| Marketplace rating | — | — |
| GitHub stars | 33.3K | 91.3K |
| Homebrew installs, 30 days | 3,127 | 4,332 |
| Hacker News mentions, 30 days | 204 | 91 |
| Latest stable release | — | 1.22.0 · 6d ago |
| Stable releases, 90 days | 23 | |
| Terminal-Bench (best run) | — | — |
| Price | Free + $20/mo | Free + $10/mo |
| License | Proprietary | GPL-3.0-or-later |
| First released | March 2023 | — |
| Interfaces | Desktop IDE, CLI, Web, Mobile, Slack, GitHub, Linear, API/SDK | Desktop IDE |
| 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. | Zed-hosted models (a GPT-6 Luna trial is offered) plus your own API keys (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and others) and external agents such as Claude Agent and Codex CLI. |
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.
Zed
High-performance open-source code editor written in Rust, with multiplayer editing, an agent panel, edit predictions and support for external agents through the Agent Client Protocol. Version 1.0 shipped in April 2026.
Pricing: Personal $0 (2,000 accepted edit predictions; unlimited with your own API keys or external agents); Pro $10/mo (unlimited edit predictions, $5 of tokens included, usage billing beyond); Business $30/seat/mo.
Latest release 1.22.0:
- Added an optional model parameter to spawnagent to choose a model for that spawn instead of using the configured subagent model or inheriting the parent model, with the active model shown in its…
- Added BYOK support for GPT-6.1 Sol with an OpenAI API key. (#64968; thanks ktKongTong)
- Added Grok 4.7 to the SuperGrok and xAI providers and made it their recommended default. (#64567; thanks raphaelluethy)
- Added the agent.threadssidebar.autoopen setting to control whether opening a folder in an existing window also opens the Threads Sidebar. (#64259, #64395; thanks jackhwalters and joshkent94)