Cursor vs GitHub Copilot: Price and Task Outcomes

For personal accounts, Copilot’s published prices are $10 a month for Pro, $39 for Pro+, and $100 for Max; Cursor’s plan prices are $20 for Pro and $60 for Pro Plus. Copilot Pro is the cheaper starting point for developers who mainly use code completion. For agent work, the effective price depends on the model and included usage, and pull-request outcomes depend on the task assigned.

The evidence does not produce a single winner. Cursor had a higher overall acceptance rate than Copilot in an observed sample of agent-created pull requests, but the study found that task category mattered more than an agent-wide average. Those results say little about the inline suggestions a completion-heavy developer uses throughout the day.

What the monthly price includes

Both entry plans offer unlimited paid-plan code completion. Cursor Pro includes separate usage pools called Cursor Models and Other Models. Selecting a third-party model draws from the Other Models pool at that model’s API rate; choosing a model in the Cursor Models pool uses a different allowance. When included usage runs out, the user can add on-demand billing or move to a higher tier.

Copilot’s individual billing terms give Pro 1,500 monthly AI credits, Pro+ 7,000, and Max 20,000, with each credit worth $0.01. That makes the listed allowances worth $15, $70, and $200 in model use, respectively. Paid-plan code completions and next edit suggestions do not consume those credits; chat, CLI, and agent activity can. The allowances contain a fixed base and a flex portion that may change.

Cursor’s pools reset with the subscription billing cycle. Copilot credits reset at the start of each calendar month and do not roll over. A prompt is not a useful common billing unit: an agent may make several model calls for one task, and a long context or costly model can consume an allowance much faster than a short interaction. Cursor’s public pricing page identifies both pools but does not give a fixed dollar balance for the Other Models pool, so a firm overage calculation requires the balance shown to the user.

Three workloads, three cost comparisons

Mostly tab completion. If chat and agent activity stay inside the included allowances, the monthly personal bill is $10 on Copilot Pro or $20 on Cursor Pro. Both include unlimited paid-plan completions. The extra $10 therefore needs to earn its place through workflow preference, such as working in Cursor’s editor, rather than through a larger stated completion quota. Agent-created pull-request acceptance is a poor measure of value for someone who rarely delegates a pull request.

Occasional agent tasks. The same $10 and $20 totals apply when the chosen model and task volume fit the respective allowances. A Copilot user draws from one AI-credit allowance for chargeable activity; a Cursor user draws from the pool associated with the selected model. Occasional documentation or feature work may fit either entry plan, while the observed acceptance difference between task categories suggests that the kind of work matters more than counting agent prompts. There is no reliable conversion from an instruction count to a monthly bill because the context, model, and number of calls can change from task to task.

Daily agent work. Consider an explicitly hypothetical month with $60 of chargeable model use under each product’s own rates. On Copilot Pro, the $15 included allowance leaves $45 of additional usage, for a $55 total if that usage is enabled. The same hypothetical spend fits within Pro+’s $70 allowance, giving a $39 subscription bill. On Cursor Pro, the total is $20 plus the portion of that $60 exceeding the user’s actual Other Models allowance, assuming all the work uses that pool. If the balance were hypothetically $20, the bill would be $60; Cursor Pro Plus starts at its $60 subscription price, with its own included balance still relevant to any overage.

Those equal-dollar examples are a way to expose the plan arithmetic, not a claim that the two products charge the same amount for identical tasks. Model selection can also move Cursor work into its other pool or alter how quickly Copilot credits are spent. Daily fix work is where the pull-request study offers the clearest task-specific comparison between these products, but its acceptance figures cannot be turned into a current cost per successful fix.

What accepted pull requests show

A study of 7,156 agent-created pull requests found 74.4% acceptance for Cursor and 68.0% for GitHub Copilot in the 11-week window common to the agents. Across the full task analysis, documentation averaged 82.1% acceptance and new features 66.1%; Cursor’s fix pull requests reached 80.4%. The researchers’ adjusted pairwise test found a Cursor advantage over Copilot for fixes, though the measured effect was small. They did not establish that advantage for every other task category.

Acceptance means that a closed pull request was merged. The dataset came from public repositories with substantial existing attention and retained pull requests that received a review or comment from someone other than the creator before closure. Copilot’s sampled pull requests also contained a larger share of fixes than Cursor’s, so their overall rates combine different mixes of work. The study’s full sample and its shorter common-window comparison answer related but distinct questions.

A merge is a repository decision, not a direct measurement of code quality or developer time saved. Review practices, user expertise, model changes, and repeated pull requests from the same repository can affect an observational comparison. The sampled agent work also predates the plan terms discussed here. Its strongest practical signal is the task split: a fix-heavy agent workflow has more relevant evidence than a completion-heavy workflow when evaluating the observed Cursor–Copilot difference.

Choose against the work you will actually assign

Copilot Pro is the lower-cost personal choice when completion does most of the work and occasional agent use stays within the included credits. Cursor Pro may be worth its higher entry price when its editor-based workflow or separate model pools suit the developer’s preferred models. For teams assigning agents many fixes, the study gives a specific reason to evaluate Cursor, while its small observed pairwise effect and repository sample limit what a team should expect from switching.

For sustained agent use, compare the monthly charge for the selected models at the expected task volume, including overage or a higher tier. Then weigh accepted changes alongside review effort and the quality of the merged work. Subscription price and pull-request acceptance describe different parts of that decision; neither alone identifies a universal winner.