Checked September 26, 2026. USD, excluding tax. Based on both vendors' published pricing pages, not a hands-on coding benchmark. Jet Admin publishes this comparison and competes with neither product.
The cleanest way to frame this: Copilot comes to your editor, Cursor asks you to change editors.
Copilot is an assistant layered into the tools you already use — VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio, Xcode, Eclipse, the CLI and GitHub itself. Cursor is a purpose-built agentic IDE from Anysphere, and adopting it means adopting the editor. That difference, plus a 2× price gap at the entry tier, decides most evaluations.
Cursor vs Copilot at a glance
| Cursor | GitHub Copilot | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A standalone agentic IDE | An assistant inside your existing editors, CLI and GitHub |
| Free tier | Hobby — no card, limited Agent requests | Free — limited chat and agent usage |
| Entry paid plan | Individual $20/month | Pro $10/month |
| What the entry plan includes | Extended Agent limits, frontier models, cloud agents | $15/month of AI credits ($10 base + $5 flex) |
| Higher individual tiers | Pro, Pro+, Ultra within Individual | Pro+ $39 ($70 credits), Max $100 ($200 credits) |
| Team plan | $40/user/month | Business and Enterprise — not priced on the plans page |
| Metering | Included model usage, then on-demand billed in arrears | GitHub AI Credits, varying by model |
| Pooled usage across a team | Enterprise | Not included on any individual plan |
Sources: Cursor pricing and GitHub Copilot plans, both checked September 26, 2026.
Copilot's credit structure is better than it looks
The plans page sets out something easy to miss. Each paid tier gives you more credit value than the subscription costs:
| Plan | Price | Base credits | Flex allotment | Total credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Limited chat and agent usage | — | |
| Pro | $10/month | $10 | $5 | $15/month |
| Pro+ | $39/month | $39 | $31 | $70/month |
| Max | $100/month | $100 | $100 | $200/month |
The flex allotment is described as "variable additional usage on top of your base" and may change over time, so treat it as a bonus rather than a contractual entitlement. Even discounting it entirely, Pro at $10 undercuts Cursor's $20 by half.
Credits are consumed by chat, agent mode, code review, the cloud agent, the CLI and Copilot Apps, with usage varying by model. When you run out you can wait for the reset, set a dollar budget and keep working, or switch to a cheaper model.
One limitation worth knowing before a team rollout: pooled usage is listed as not included on Free, Pro, Pro+ or Max. Credits do not share across colleagues on these plans.
What Cursor charges for
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Hobby | Free | No card required, limited Agent requests, Composer |
| Individual | $20/month | Extended Agent limits, frontier models, MCPs, skills and hooks, cloud agents, Bugbot on usage-based billing |
| Teams | $40/user/month | Centralised billing, team marketplace, shared-context cloud agents, Bugbot code reviews, usage analytics, team-wide privacy mode, SAML/OIDC SSO |
| Enterprise | Custom | Pooled usage, invoice/PO billing, SCIM, repository and model access controls, audit logs, AI code tracking API |
Individual splits further into Pro, Pro+ and Ultra, and Teams into Standard and Premium. Every plan includes a set amount of model usage, with on-demand usage billed in arrears after that.
Copilot as an orchestrator
A feature that does not get enough attention: on Pro+ and Max, Copilot can delegate tasks to third-party coding agents including Claude and OpenAI Codex. If you are weighing several assistants, that reframes the question — Copilot can route work to the others rather than compete head-on with them.
Its model list is similarly open, including several Anthropic models alongside GitHub's own options, with credit consumption varying by which you pick.
Which should you choose?
Choose Copilot if you want to keep your current editor, if $10 a month is the budget, if you work across GitHub as well as an IDE, or if delegating to other agents appeals. It is the lower-friction option in almost every respect.
Choose Cursor if you want an editor designed around agents rather than an assistant bolted into one, if Composer and its agent workflow suit how you work, or if you need team features like shared-context cloud agents and a rules marketplace at $40 a seat.
For teams, check pooled usage explicitly. Cursor reserves it for Enterprise; Copilot's plans page shows it excluded from every individual tier. If ten developers each hitting their own ceiling independently would be a problem, price the tier that actually pools before committing.
Where Jet Admin fits
Neither product is an alternative to Jet Admin, and this section is short for that reason. Both write code a developer reviews and maintains. Jet Admin builds a running application over a database or API you already have, with no codebase produced.
The one genuine overlap: a large share of what developers are asked to build with these tools is internal — an admin panel, a back-office queue, an operations dashboard. For that category specifically it is worth asking whether the result needs to be code you own at all, or whether an application platform gets there with less to maintain. For anything customer-facing or product-critical, the coding assistants are doing work Jet Admin does not attempt.
Frequently asked questions
Is Cursor or Copilot cheaper?
Copilot, at the entry point: Pro is $10 a month against Cursor's $20 Individual plan, and Pro includes $15 of AI credits.
Do both have free plans?
Yes. Cursor's Hobby plan needs no credit card and allows limited Agent requests; Copilot Free offers limited chat and agent usage, with CLI and agent mode supported.
What are GitHub AI Credits?
The unit consumed by chat, agent mode, code review, the cloud agent, the CLI and Copilot Apps. Consumption varies by model, so a frontier model burns credits faster than a smaller one.
Can Copilot use Claude or Codex?
Its model list includes several Anthropic models, and Pro+ and Max can delegate tasks to third-party coding agents including Claude and OpenAI Codex.
Does either share usage across a team?
Cursor pools usage on Enterprise. Copilot's plans page lists pooled usage as not included on Free, Pro, Pro+ or Max — check Business and Enterprise terms if this matters.
Do I have to switch editors for Cursor?
Yes — Cursor is its own IDE. Copilot works inside VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Eclipse and Xcode, as well as the CLI and GitHub.
Price the editor switch, not just the subscription
The $10 difference is the smallest cost in this decision. Moving a team to a new IDE means extensions, settings, keybindings and habits — real hours that dwarf a year of the price gap. Trial Cursor on a genuine task before assuming the switch is free.
If the work you keep pointing an assistant at is an internal tool on data you already have, try building that one in Jet Admin and compare it against the code either assistant hands you to maintain.
