Cursor alternatives, on published prices
The six tools that answer the same brief as Cursor, on one axis set, with every figure traced to the vendor's own pricing page and the day it was read.
Four reasons to leave Cursor, and each one picks a different tool. Cost, at team size: Augment Code is "$100 /month flat - no per-seat charge" for up to 50 seats, so a twenty-developer team pays a fifth of Cursor Teams at $40 / user / mo. Cost, at individual size: GitHub Copilot Pro is $ 10 USD per user / month, half of Cursor's $20, and it is already on an invoice your company approved. Control: Zed's Personal plan is "$0 forever" with unlimited use of your own API keys, and Cline charges no subscription at all — "Pay only for AI inference on a usage basis" — so on both the only bill is the model bill. Shape of work: Claude Code is a terminal agent rather than an editor, included in the same $20 Pro subscription as the chat product, and it composes with whatever editor you already have. What none of them is, is a cheaper Cursor — every one of these is a different product with a different failure mode. One thing to check before you move: windsurf.com/pricing now redirects to devin.ai/pricing, so a comparison written before that is describing something that no longer exists in that form. ToolDrift sells none of these.
7 compared · 4 criteria, identical for every column · every competitor figure read off that company's own page · last verified 2026-08-14
AI coding tools compared on the same 4 criteria
| Cursor | Windsurf | GitHub Copilot | Claude Code | Zed | Cline | Augment Code | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Hobby — Free "No credit card required", limited Agent requests, access to Composer. | Free $0 ⚠ windsurf.com/pricing redirects to devin.ai/pricing, and the plan table it serves is Cognition's Devin — the editor appears on it as Devin Desktop. Read 2026-08-14. The free tier is a "Light quota to code with agents", limited model availability, unlimited Tab completions. | $ 0 USD — 2,000 completions per month "Access to Haiku 4.5, GPT-5 mini, and more", Copilot CLI, community support, no credit card. | $0 — Free for everyone The free Claude plan does not include Claude Code; the page lists Claude Code from Pro upwards. | $0 forever (Personal) 2,000 accepted edit predictions, and "Unlimited use with your API keys or external agents like Claude Agent, Codex CLI, and more". | Free — the open-source extension "You only pay for AI inference on a usage basis - no subscriptions, no vendor lock-in." | Not published Augment publishes two plans, Business and Enterprise. Neither is free and there is no free tier on the page. |
| Cheapest paid plan | $20 / mo. (Individual) The Individual card names three tiers — Pro, Pro+ and Ultra — and prints one price for all three. Read with a fetch and again in a real browser on 2026-08-14: no second or third figure is on the page at load. | $20 per month (Pro) Adds "Full model availability", frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and access to cloud agents. Max is $200 per month. | $ 10 USD per user / month (Pro) Adds the cloud agent and code review, unlimited completions, and third-party agents — the page names Claude Code and Codex. Pro+ is $ 39 USD and Max is $ 100 USD. | $20 if billed monthly (Pro) $17 per month with the annual discount, $200 billed up front. Pro "Includes Claude Code". | $10 per month (Pro) Unlimited edit predictions and "$5 of tokens included", with Zed-hosted models. | Not published There is no paid subscription tier to name. The only plan beside Open Source is Enterprise, priced "Custom". | $100 /month flat - no per-seat charge (Business) "$100/mo of usage across LLM, Context Engine & compute" is included in that. |
| Team plan | $40 / user / mo. (Teams) Standard and Premium sit under that one price on the card. Enterprise is "Custom". | $80 /month for the team plan plus $40/mo per full dev seat Unlimited team members; each full seat carries its own quota. Enterprise is "Let's talk". | Not published The plan grid carries a "For businesses" tab, and this page's own text prices only the individual plans — Free, Pro, Pro+ and Max. Nothing readable on it prices Copilot Business or Copilot Enterprise. | $25 if billed monthly, per seat (Team) $20 per seat / month billed annually. A Premium seat is $125 monthly or $100 annually and carries "5x more usage than standard seats*". | $30 per seat, per month (Business) Adds org-wide model policies, data governance and unified spend. "Business seats don't bundle a fixed LLM credit allotment." | Not published Enterprise is the team offering and its price is "Custom" — the page's call to action is "Contact Sales". | $100/month flat, up to 50 seats included "One flat price for your whole team - up to 50 seats with $100 of usage included every month." Enterprise is "Custom". |
| Past the included usage | On-demand usage, billed in arrears "Every plan includes a set amount of model usage. On-demand usage allows you to continue using models after your included amount is consumed, billed in arrears." | Buy extra usage at API pricing "Each paid plan comes with a usage allowance that refreshes automatically on a daily and weekly basis... If you do go beyond your included usage on a paid plan, you can purchase extra usage which is consumed at API pricing." | GitHub AI Credits — $15 monthly total credits for Pro Credits are consumed by chat, agent mode, code review and the cloud agent. Pro+ carries $70 of monthly credits and Max $200. | Not published The plans are described in multiples rather than rates — "More usage*", "Choose 5x or 20x more usage than Pro*" — and the asterisk points at "Usage limits apply." No per-unit price for exceeding a plan is printed on this page. | Usage-based billing beyond the $5 of tokens included Or bring your own keys, "in which case spend goes directly to your provider". | You pay for inference — at cost, or on your own key "You can bring your own API keys from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others. This gives you complete control over your costs and usage." | Top-ups, pay as you go Past the $100 of included usage you buy top-ups rather than moving to a higher tier. |
“Not published” means that company does not state the figure on the page cited at the foot of this page. It is not a claim that no such figure exists. A company that publishes no limit most likely has none — but “most likely” is not a fact, and this table prints what was read rather than what was inferred.
- Free tier — what the vendor gives you at $0 a month, in its own words
- Past the included usage — what the vendor says happens when the plan's allowance runs out — the line that decides the real bill, and the one no headline price includes
What is the cheapest alternative to Cursor?
Free ones, and they are real products rather than trials: Zed's Personal plan is "$0 forever" with "Unlimited use with your API keys or external agents like Claude Agent, Codex CLI, and more", and Cline is free for individual developers with no subscription at all. Of the paid tiers, GitHub Copilot Pro at $ 10 USD per user / month is the cheapest, half Cursor's $20 / mo. On both of the free ones you still pay for model inference — the saving is the subscription, not the tokens.
Which Cursor alternative is best for a team?
Augment Code on price, GitHub Copilot on procurement. Augment is "$100 /month flat - no per-seat charge" with "Up to 50 seats included", which is the only non-per-seat price in this comparison — against Cursor Teams at $40 / user / mo. that inverts somewhere around three developers. Copilot is cheaper per head and already inside a GitHub bill, but its own plans page carries only the individual tiers; the business ones sit behind a "For businesses" tab and are not on the page's text at all.
Do any of these let me use my own API key?
Zed and Cline, explicitly. Zed's free plan says "Unlimited use with your API keys or external agents", and on Business "you can use Zed-hosted AI at standard usage rates, or bring your own API keys from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others - in which case spend goes directly to your provider". Cline lists "Purchase and Model Inference at Cost or BYOK" and names Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, OpenRouter, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex and others. Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot and Claude Code sell you bundled usage instead.
Is Windsurf still a Cursor alternative?
It is, but not the one people mean. windsurf.com/pricing redirects to devin.ai/pricing and the plan table there is Cognition's Devin, with the editor listed as "Devin Desktop". So switching to Windsurf today means buying into Devin's plan ladder — Free, Pro at $20 per month, Max at $200 per month — and what the money buys is cloud agents rather than a better editor. Read on 2026-08-14. This is the exact class of change ToolDrift exists to catch: the comparison articles still in circulation were written before it.
When each of these is the right pick
ToolDrift does not sell any of these and has nothing to gain from which one you choose — it scores them. Each case below is the one that option genuinely wins.
- Cursor — You want the editor everyone else on the team already knows, and you want the agent and the editor to be one product rather than a plugin. Cursor is the default answer for a reason: it is the most widely used of these, its $20 tier is the same price as the cheapest agent subscription here, and its Teams tier at $40 / user / mo. is the only one on this table that bundles SSO, pooled billing and agentic code review without a sales call.
- Windsurf — You want the agent to keep working after you close the laptop. Cognition sells Windsurf and Devin as one thing now, so the $20 tier buys cloud agents rather than only a local editor, and the Max tier at $200 per month is the only published price in this table aimed squarely at someone running long autonomous jobs rather than pair-programming.
- GitHub Copilot — The code already lives in GitHub and you would rather add a line to an invoice you are already paying than start a new vendor relationship. Copilot is the cheapest paid tier in this table at $ 10 USD per user / month, it is the only one whose agent runs inside pull requests and code review natively, and it is the one your procurement department has already approved.
- Claude Code — The work is agentic rather than autocomplete — long refactors, migrations, a task you describe once and come back to. Claude Code is a terminal agent rather than an editor, so it composes with whatever editor you already use instead of replacing it, and it is included in the same $20 Pro subscription as the chat product rather than being a separate bill.
- Zed — You already pay for model access somewhere else and you resent paying twice. Zed's Personal plan is "$0 forever" with "Unlimited use with your API keys or external agents like Claude Agent, Codex CLI, and more" — it is the only editor in this table whose free tier is a complete product rather than a trial, and it is open source, so bringing your own key is a supported path rather than a workaround.
- Cline — You want the agent's costs to be your model bill and nothing else, and you want to see every token it spends. Cline is open source, charges no subscription at all — "Pay only for AI inference on a usage basis - no subscriptions, no vendor lock-in" — and it runs against Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, Bedrock and Vertex, so nobody between you and the model is taking a margin you cannot see.
- Augment Code — The codebase is large enough that context is the whole problem, and the team is big enough that per-seat pricing has stopped being rational. Augment is the only entry in this table priced as "$100 /month flat - no per-seat charge" for up to 50 seats — so a twenty-developer team pays a fifth of what the same team pays for Cursor Teams, and the retrieval engine is what it sells rather than the editor.
What was checked, and when
Prices and limits move, and a page quoting a stale one is worth less than a page quoting none. Every source is printed here so a reader can check it against the day they are reading this, and a job re-fetches each of these URLs on a schedule and fails when a figure above no longer appears on the page it came from.
- Cursor — cursor.com/pricing — Free tier, Cheapest paid plan, Team plan, Past the included usage. Read 2026-08-14.
- Windsurf — windsurf.com/pricing — Free tier, Cheapest paid plan, Team plan, Past the included usage. Read 2026-08-14.
- GitHub Copilot — github.com/features/copilot/plans — Free tier, Cheapest paid plan, Team plan, Past the included usage. Read 2026-08-14.
- Claude Code — claude.com/pricing — Free tier, Cheapest paid plan, Team plan, Past the included usage. Read 2026-08-14.
- Zed — zed.dev/pricing — Free tier, Cheapest paid plan, Team plan, Past the included usage. Read 2026-08-14.
- Cline — cline.bot/pricing — Free tier, Cheapest paid plan, Team plan, Past the included usage. Read 2026-08-14.
- Augment Code — augmentcode.com/pricing — Free tier, Cheapest paid plan, Team plan, Past the included usage. Read 2026-08-14.
Last verified 2026-08-14. https://tooldrift.kynth.studio/cursor-alternatives
