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COMPARE · CURSOR VS GITHUB COPILOT

Cursor vs GitHub Copilot for engineering teams.

Sources last reviewed

Cursor is its own AI editor; GitHub Copilot works inside the editor you already use (VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode or Eclipse) and on GitHub. Both run models from several vendors, so choose by editor first, then by how each bills past its included usage.[1][2][3][4]

Zest reads each engineer's Cursor and GitHub Copilot Chat sessions (model, tokens, skills and MCP tools), joins them to the pull requests they led to, and shows both side by side. One workspace price: 5 engineers pay $49/mo on Pro.

Measure both with Zest:

  • Cursor and GitHub Copilot Chat sessions side by side, per engineer
  • The model, skills and MCP tools behind each session
  • Which tool's sessions end in merged pull requests
  • A daily standup written from both
Get started for free See the comparison

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Winding / Teams Last 30 days

Zest

3 Members 1 Agent
Team overview
67%
AI Adoption▲ 34 pts
240
PRs Merged▲ 101
96.1h
Median AI Time▲ 9.5h
57.2h
Build Hours▲ 20.3h
This week
Member AI PRs/wk AI Task Plan Impl Last Standup AI Stack
22.8/wk28 min ago
15.8/wk12 min ago
4/wkAug 14
—2 hours ago
Current AI models & harnesses As of Sep 8
Claude CodeFable 5.1 (max) (with fallback)70.4 · Coding Agent Index
CodexGPT-6 Astra (max)67.0 · Coding Agent Index
Muse CodeMuse Spark 1.3 (xhigh)64.2 · Coding Agent Index
Grok BuildGrok 4.5 (high)64.1 · Coding Agent Index
Kimi Code CLIKimi K362.6 · Coding Agent Index
OpencodeGemini 3.8 Flash (high)61.2 · Coding Agent Index
Cursor CLIComposer 2.5 Fast38.3 · Coding Agent Index

Demo setups use current model families. The pairings above are the combinations benchmarked by Artificial Analysis; rankings measure performance, not popularity.

Claude Fable 5.1 (max with fallback)53.4GPT-6 Astra (max)52.8Claude Opus 5 (max)50.7Muse Spark 1.3 (max)48.2GLM-5.3 (max)44.9Grok 4.6 (high)44.4

Intelligence Index

Illustrative daily trends · Other totals: last 30 days. Build Hours: this week, model-estimated activity including overlap; not engineer hours.

USED BY ENGINEERING TEAMS AT

FlypsCharmWildfiresGeoforgeMisaLabs

AT A GLANCE

Cursor vs GitHub Copilot, side by side

What each tool documents, row by row.

Cursor vs GitHub Copilot, side by side
CursorGitHub Copilot
Team seats for 5 engineers$160/mo — Cursor Teams Standard at $32 a seat, billed annually ($40 monthly).[5]$95/mo — Copilot Business at $19 a seat, with 1,900 pooled AI credits.[6]
Where it runsThe Cursor editor (Agent pane and Agents Window), the Cursor CLI, Cloud Agents in VMs, and JetBrains through ACP.[1]Agent mode in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode and Eclipse; the Copilot CLI and app; a cloud agent on GitHub.[2]
ModelsOpenAI, Anthropic, Google, SpaceXAI (Grok) and more, plus Cursor's own Composer; Auto routing and bring-your-own keys.[3]OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI (Grok) and other vendors' models, picked per chat.[4]
Project instructions.cursor/rules, team rules and AGENTS.md; it also applies CLAUDE.md, for Claude Code compatibility.[7].github/copilot-instructions.md and .github/instructions; AGENTS.md in VS Code chat, and AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md in the cloud agent and CLI.[8]
Skills, subagents and hooksAgent Skills, subagents in .cursor/agents and hooks; it also loads .claude and .codex skills and agents.[9]Agent skills (.github, .claude or .agents skills), custom agents, prompt files and hooks.[10]
MCP serversStdio, SSE and Streamable HTTP servers through mcp.json; Cloud Agents can use team MCP servers.[11]In IDEs, the CLI, the app and the cloud agent; for Business and Enterprise the MCP policy is off by default.[12]
Team analytics, built inTeams dashboard: AI share of committed code, agent edits, messages by model, daily users and a leaderboard.[13]A 28-day usage metrics dashboard, code generation and impact dashboards, and a per-user REST API.[14]
Checking your own usageA usage dashboard and editor settings show included usage per pool, Cursor models and other models.[3]Copilot settings show usage this cycle in AI credits; the Copilot CLI's /usage shows tokens and credits per model.[15]

Each tool's column is read from its vendor's own docs and pricing page, dated in the sources below.

Cursor or GitHub Copilot: which one fits your team

Pick Cursor if your team will move to one editor built around the agent, with Cursor's own Composer models, Auto routing, a CLI and Cloud Agents. Each seat's usage belongs to that person; past it, on-demand usage is billed at API prices, and on Teams Cursor adds its token rate to third-party models.

Pick Copilot if your engineers use different editors, or you want AI credits pooled across the organization: each Business seat adds its credits to one pool everyone draws on. Copilot runs in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode and Eclipse, and on GitHub as a cloud agent.

Cursor vs GitHub Copilot pricing and limits

Cursor and GitHub Copilot, from each vendor's pricing page in October 2026:

  • Cursor Pro is $20 a month, Pro+ $60 and Ultra $200, and a Teams seat is $40 per user ($32 billed yearly). Cursor publishes no number for any plan's included usage: every plan includes a set amount, and the models you pick decide how fast it runs out. More on Cursor pricing.
  • Copilot Business is $19 a seat, with 1,900 pooled AI credits.

Running Cursor and GitHub Copilot on one repository

Keep shared instructions in AGENTS.md: Cursor reads it next to .cursor/rules, and Copilot's cloud agent and CLI read it too, while Copilot in the editor reads .github/copilot-instructions.md. Put skills in .claude/skills and both tools load them.

TRY IT ON YOUR TEAM

See what your team ships with AI.

Starter is free (3 seats, no credit card). Pro is $49 a month with 5 seats and Max is $149 a month with 10 seats — priced per workspace, not per engineer, with extra seats at $19 a month.

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A FEW THINGS TO KNOW

Questions

Does Zest capture Copilot inline completions or Cursor Tab?+

No. Zest reads Cursor's chat and agent sessions and Copilot Chat sessions in VS Code: the conversation, the models used and the skills and tools they called. GitHub's Copilot metrics and Cursor's team analytics stay the source for completions.