Copilot lives inside GitHub and offers the widest model menu on every plan from $10 a month; Cursor is a dedicated editor whose agents go further, but whose plans favour Grok and bill Claude, GPT and Gemini at API price. Both have moved to usage-based billing that heavy agent users will find harder to predict.
The choice turns on where you want the AI to sit. Copilot is built into GitHub itself: you can assign an issue to its cloud agent, receive a pull request and have Copilot review colleagues' pull requests without adding a vendor or changing editors. Cursor asks you to move into its editor, a VS Code fork, and in return gives you an Agents Window that runs many local and cloud agents side by side. Its cloud agents work in their own virtual machines and, as CNBC reported in February 2026, can test their changes and record video, logs and screenshots of what they did.
On models, Copilot is the more generous product. Its plans page lists Claude (including Opus 5.5), OpenAI's GPT-5.x and GPT-6 models, Gemini, Grok, Kimi and Microsoft's MAI-Code on every individual plan, and Pro+ and Max can hand tasks to the Claude and Codex agents. Cursor's cheapest paid plan, Plus at $8, is limited to Grok, and on Premium and above, Claude, GPT and Gemini are billed outside the allowance at API list price. If those are the models you want, Copilot's $10 Pro is the far cheaper way in.
Neither bill is simple any more. Since June 1, 2026, Copilot's chat, agents, code review and CLI burn AI Credits by token use; coverage of the change reports that included usage effectively shrank for heavy users and that the old fallback to a cheaper model is gone. Completions and next edit suggestions stay outside credits, so light users will barely notice. Cursor pools usage weekly with Grok under an X Subscription bundle, and Wikipedia records a July 2025 pricing change that ended in refunds.
What each does worse: Copilot's agent experience is less focused than dedicated agent tools, and Free, Pro and Pro+ interactions may be used for training unless you opt out. Cursor ties your editor subscription to X and Grok perks many developers do not want. For a company already buying GitHub Enterprise, Copilot's admin, policy and indemnity features settle the question. For an individual who wants the strongest agent workflow inside an editor, Cursor is still ahead.