AI Coding Assistant Pricing Comparison Table

The short definition

AI coding assistant pricing splits into a flat subscription and, in Copilot's case, a separate credit allowance for premium features. GitHub Copilot's cheapest paid tier is Pro at $10/mo with unlimited completions and next-edit suggestions plus $15/mo of AI credits for chat and agent work. Cursor's cheapest paid tier is Pro at $20/mo, which extends Agent request limits and adds frontier model access and cloud agents — Cursor doesn't split completions from agent usage the way Copilot splits completions from credits.

How it actually works

The two tools price around fundamentally different products: Copilot is a plugin that lives inside your existing editor, while Cursor is a standalone editor forked from VS Code with agent editing built into the core experience.

Copilot's ladder is built around a credit allowance that scales with price — completions are unlimited on every paid tier starting at $10/mo, but chat, agents, and other premium features draw down a monthly credit balance that grows from $15/mo on Pro to $70/mo on Pro+ and $200/mo on Max. That means the entry price looks cheap, but heavy agentic use pushes you toward the $39 or $100 tiers to get a workable credit allowance.

Cursor's ladder is structured around Agent request limits instead of a credit balance — Hobby gives you a limited amount for free, and Pro at $20/mo extends that along with frontier model access and cloud agents. On top of the subscription, Cursor's Bugbot code review feature is billed separately as usage, so a team relying on automated review should budget for that outside the flat $20/mo. Teams (Standard) at $40/mo per user adds SSO, centralized billing, usage analytics, and team privacy mode on top of Pro's individual limits.

When you need it — and when you do not

If your workflow is centered on inline completions and you want to keep your current editor — VS Code, JetBrains, or Visual Studio — Copilot's plugin model is the lower-friction and lower-cost choice at $10/mo for unlimited completions. The free tier's 2,000 completions a month is also genuinely usable for light use, and it's free for verified students, teachers, and maintainers of popular open source projects, which makes it an easy default when cost matters most.

If multi-file, repo-wide agent editing is your actual workflow rather than an occasional feature, Cursor's product is built around that from the ground up rather than treating it as a credit-metered add-on. The tradeoff is leaving your current editor for a VS Code fork — low migration cost since extensions and keybindings carry over, but still a different application to adopt — and paying $20/mo minimum to get past Hobby's limited Agent requests.

Neither tool is the obvious pick for every budget. A solo developer doing mostly completions with occasional chat should default to Copilot's $10/mo Pro tier and only look at Pro+ or Max if the $15/mo credit allowance runs out. A developer or small team doing heavy agentic refactors across a codebase should expect to pay at least $20/mo per person for Cursor Pro, plus Bugbot usage costs if code review is part of the workflow.

The tools that do this

Cursor and GitHub Copilot are the two mainstream options in this comparison, and the pricing gap tracks a real product difference rather than one being simply cheaper. For a feature-by-feature breakdown beyond price, Cursor vs GitHub Copilot covers the full comparison, and Claude Code vs Cursor is worth reading if you're weighing a terminal-based agent against Cursor's IDE-first approach.

If Cursor's $20/mo Pro tier or its Bugbot usage billing gives you pause, Cursor alternatives rounds up free and paid options beyond these two, and Cursor vs Windsurf compares Cursor against another AI-first editor directly. The practical takeaway: price the tool against your actual usage pattern, not the sticker price alone — Copilot's $10/mo can turn into $39 or $100/mo under heavy agent use, and Cursor's $20/mo doesn't include Bugbot, so neither number is the full monthly cost in isolation.

Team pricing is worth a separate look before committing either way. Cursor's Teams (Standard) tier is $40/mo per user and adds SSO, centralized billing, usage analytics, and team privacy mode on top of individual Pro limits, which is a real cost multiplier for a five- or ten-person team. Copilot doesn't publish a distinct per-seat team tier in this fact sheet, but its individual Pro, Pro+, and Max tiers scale the same way whether purchased for one developer or rolled out across a team, so the comparison at team scale comes down to whether Cursor's SSO and centralized billing are worth the jump from $20 to $40 per seat. For an engineering lead deciding between the two at team scale, that governance layer — not the base completion or agent pricing — is often the deciding factor.