Method: Official documentation and pricing checked September 28, 2026. No benchmarks were run. Recommendations are based on documented features and billing, not hands-on results.
The useful question is which workflow and billing model fits your work. This page does not declare a code-quality winner or claim that either tool produces a measured speedup.
Current subscription prices
Cursor lists a free Hobby tier with limited Agent requests, a $20/month Pro option and Teams at $40/user/month. Its paid plan descriptions do not justify saying that every model and agent action is unlimited.
GitHub’s pricing page lists Copilot Pro at $10/month, Pro+ at $39 and Max at $100. Free is a limited entry option. GitHub’s current billing model uses AI Credits for features such as agent interactions. Do not use a historical premium-request allowance to predict the present bill.
| Buying question | Why it changes the comparison |
|---|---|
| Is this an individual purchase or an organization rollout? | Team administration and policy requirements can change the plan |
| Which models and agent features are needed? | A subscription price alone does not state usable capacity |
| Where must the workflow run? | Editor, CLI and repository-agent requirements may differ |
| What happens after included usage? | Additional spending and limits need to be understood before adoption |
Individual and team plans are different purchases
GitHub’s plan documentation lists Business at $19 per granted seat/month and Enterprise at $39. For ten Business seats, the base calculation is $190/month before extra usage or taxes. Ten Cursor Teams seats at the displayed rate are $400/month. These are subscription calculations, not claims that the features or included usage are equivalent.
Choose the plan that meets the organization’s administration requirements before evaluating a price difference. A cheaper personal plan is not a substitute for required team controls.
How to evaluate assistance
Use a real but bounded task with tests and explicit acceptance criteria. Ask each candidate to explain the relevant code, propose a change and implement it. Inspect whether the change is correct, understandable and maintainable. Record review effort and rejected changes as well as completed work.
Do not infer accuracy from polished explanations. Check generated dependencies, APIs and error paths against the project. Keep sensitive repositories within whatever access and data-handling policy your organization has approved.
Recommendation
Evaluate Copilot when its supported GitHub and editor workflows meet your needs; evaluate Cursor when you want its editor-centered Agent experience. Start with a bounded pilot and compare actual usage against the plan allowance. No published price establishes which will finish your particular project faster.
Sources, checked September 28, 2026: Cursor plans, Copilot pricing, Copilot plan documentation.