Cursor alternatives: 9 AI editors and agents compared

Cursor alternatives compared

The table below compares nine tools you can switch to right now. Four of them are full editors, and five are coding agents that run inside an editor or terminal you already use.

Why people look for a Cursor alternative

• Cursor is now sold inside The X Subscription alongside Grok and X (Free $0, Plus $8, Premium $30, Super $100, Ultra $200 a month), and your included weekly usage pool is shared with Grok.
• Cursor Plus at $8 a month only runs Cursor's own models, such as Grok 4.7, at fixed settings, with no Auto, no Cloud Agents, no third-party models and no option to bring your own API keys.
• On Cursor Premium at $30 a month and higher tiers, Claude, GPT and Gemini models aren't in the included pool and bill at API list price from prepaid credit, with Claude Opus 5.5 costing $4 input and $20 output per 1M tokens and Claude Sonnet 5.5 costing $2 and $10 (see our Cursor vs Claude Code breakdown).
• OpenAI announced on August 28, 2026 that it's winding down its contract supplying models to Cursor after SpaceX acquired Cursor's parent company Anysphere, with a proposed shutoff on November 12, 2026, so Cursor won't get future OpenAI models like Astra.
• On Vals AI's Terminal-Bench 4.0 (October 29, 2026), Cursor's included Grok 4.7 scores 28.79% compared to 65.15% for Claude Opus 5.5, 59.60% for GPT-6 Astra and 57.58% for Gemini 4 Argon, while Cursor's Composer 2.5 gets 49.61% on Vals AI Vibe Code Bench (run in Cursor CLI) against 92.39% for Claude Sonnet 5.5.

Editors that replace Cursor

• VS Code with GitHub Copilot gives you agent mode, code review and a wide model lineup (Claude Sonnet 5.5, GPT-6.1 Terra, Grok 4.7, Kimi K3 and more) on Copilot Pro for $10 a month, which includes $15 of GitHub AI Credits ($10 base plus $5 flex), plus there's a $0 Free tier, Pro+ at $39 ($70 of credits) that adds Claude Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and Gemini 4 Argon, and Max at $100 ($200 of credits).
• Zed is a fast open-source code editor (GPL and Apache-2.0) where the Personal plan is $0 if you plug in your own API keys from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google AI, OpenRouter, Bedrock, Ollama or LM Studio, or hook up external agents like Claude Agent and Codex CLI, while Zed Pro costs $10 a month with $5 of tokens and bills API list price plus 10% after that.
• Devin Desktop, which windsurf.com/pricing now redirects to at devin.ai/pricing, is Cognition's closed-source editor that runs its own SWE-2 model alongside models from the major providers, with a $0 Free tier, Pro at $20 a month, Max at $200 a month and Team at $80 a month plus $40 per full user.
• Google Antigravity is Google's agentic IDE, CLI (agy command) and app with subagents, MCP, skills, hooks and plugins; the Individual plan is $0 with basic weekly rate limits, and Google AI Pro at $19.99 a month (or Ultra at $99.99 or $199.99 a month) raises your limits and includes Gemini 4 Argon.

Agents that work in any editor

If you don't want to switch editors, you can run a subscription agent inside your existing setup. Claude Code is Anthropic's proprietary coding agent that runs in the terminal, VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, a desktop app, mobile and the web at claude.ai/code, and it comes included with Claude Pro ($20 a month, or $17 a month billed yearly), Max 5x ($100) and Max 20x ($200). OpenAI's open-source Codex CLI (Apache-2.0, installed via npm install -g @openai/codex) and its IDE extension for VS Code, Cursor and Windsurf are included with ChatGPT Plus ($20 a month), Pro (from $100) and Business, giving you GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6.1 Terra and GPT-6 Luna (ChatGPT Free and Go users also get GPT-6 Luna in Codex in the ChatGPT desktop app, subject to rollout).

If you'd rather use a free Claude Code alternative and pay only your model provider for inference, you have three open-source options. Cline (Apache-2.0, about 71,000 GitHub stars) and Kilo Code (MIT, about 27,800 GitHub stars, also offering Kilo Gateway at provider rates or Kilo Pass from $19 a month) both run as extensions inside VS Code using your own API keys. OpenCode (MIT, about 223,000 GitHub stars in October 2026) runs in the terminal (curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/v2/install | bash) or its desktop app, works with 75+ providers, local models, ChatGPT Plus or Pro, GitHub Copilot, GitLab Duo, and any OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions API via @ai-sdk/openai-compatible.

Which alternative to pick

• You want the Cursor experience with more models for less: pick VS Code with GitHub Copilot Pro at $10 a month, which gets you $15 in AI credits and access to Claude, GPT-6 and Gemini models (Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra and Gemini 4 Argon need Pro+ at $39).
• You want a fast open-source editor: pick Zed on the $0 Personal plan with your own API keys or external CLI agents, or pay $10 a month for Zed Pro.
• You want Claude without per-token bills: pick Claude Code on a $20 a month Claude Pro subscription, which works in the terminal, VS Code and JetBrains.
• You want GPT models after OpenAI leaves Cursor: pick Codex with a $20 a month ChatGPT Plus plan to use GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol in the CLI or the VS Code extension.
• You want free tools and your own keys: pick Cline or Kilo Code in VS Code, or run OpenCode in your terminal.

Bring your subscriptions to any editor

Plan2API turns the AI subscriptions you already pay for (Claude Pro and Max, ChatGPT plans through Codex, Google AI Pro and Ultra through Antigravity, and Kimi memberships through Kimi Code) into one OpenAI-compatible endpoint at https://api.plan2api.com/v1 with a single p2a_ key. Any editor or agent above that accepts a custom OpenAI Chat Completions provider (using POST /v1/chat/completions and GET /v1/models with an Authorization: Bearer header) can route requests through your existing plans by prefixing the model id with claude/, openai/, gemini/ or kimi/, and Plan2API never bills per token. Codex and Claude Code are the exceptions: Codex custom providers must speak the Responses API, and Claude Code expects the Anthropic Messages API.

If you stay on Cursor with a Premium ($30) or higher plan, you can point Cursor's OpenAI base URL override at https://api.plan2api.com/v1 to use your connected subscriptions in Chat. Plan2API Free costs $0 with no card required and includes 1 connected subscription, 2 API keys and 50 chat requests a day (Pro is $12 a month or $99 a year for 3 subscriptions and no daily request cap).