Coding · Head-to-head
Cursor vs Devin
Cursor (freemium, AI Score 9.2/10) vs Devin (paid, AI Score 7.8/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.
The verdict
Pick Cursor if…
- →you need a genuinely free option
- →budget is the constraint
- →overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 9.2 vs 7.8)
- →you want our editor's pick for this category
Pick Devin if…
- →your primary use case is platform and infrastructure teams running repetitive multi-service work — framework upgrades, dependency migrations, test backfill — who want tasks delegated from jira or slack and returned as reviewable prs.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Cursor | Devin |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Coding | Coding |
| Pricing model | freemium | paid |
| Headline pricing | Free Hobby + Individual $20/mo + Teams $40/user/mo + Enterprise custom | Core pay-as-you-go from $20; Team $500/mo; Enterprise custom — check site for current ACU rates |
| Free tier | Free Hobby plan, no credit card required, with limited Agent requests and access to the Composer model. | — |
| AI Score | 9.2/10 | 7.8/10 |
| Best for | Professional developers who want an IDE-native agent that can also run in the cloud and be steered from a phone, and engineering teams that need admin control over which model handles which request. | Platform and infrastructure teams running repetitive multi-service work — framework upgrades, dependency migrations, test backfill — who want tasks delegated from Jira or Slack and returned as reviewable PRs. |
| Editor's pick | ✓ Yes | — |
| Use cases | development agents | development agents |
| Date added | 2025-04-01 | 2026-05-01 |
Pros and cons
Cursor
Coding · freemium
Pros
- ✓Multi-file editing across an indexed codebase is still the category benchmark, handling imports and cross-file references without hand-holding
- ✓Agents run in the editor, in the cloud, or from an iOS app, so a long job does not need your laptop awake
- ✓Composer is a first-party agentic model, so Cursor is not purely a reseller of other labs' tokens
- ✓Cursor Router gives admins one lever on org-wide model spend plus control over which models are reachable, which matters for approved-model and data-residency rules
- ✓The free Hobby tier includes Composer access rather than gating the in-house model behind a card
Cons
- ×Pro+ and Ultra appear on the pricing page with 3x and 20x limit multipliers but no published price, so real cost above $20/mo is opaque until you are inside the product
- ×Usage-based limits replaced the old fixed request quotas, making monthly spend harder to predict than a flat seat fee
- ×Cursor Router is Teams and Enterprise only, so solo developers get none of the routing savings, and the 60% figure is Cursor's own A/B with Cost mode's quality tradeoff undocumented
- ×SpaceX's $60B acquisition of Anysphere leaves the product's independence and long-term branding unsettled
Devin
Coding · paid
Pros
- ✓Usage-based entry tier removed the old $500/month floor, so a team can trial it for the price of a couple of tasks
- ✓Devin Wiki and Devin Search give grounded, citation-backed answers about large unfamiliar codebases
- ✓Parallel sessions and enterprise fan-out make repetitive migrations across many services genuinely tractable
- ✓Delegation from Slack, Linear, Jira and GitHub plus a public API fits existing workflows without an IDE switch
- ✓Full session replay of every shell command makes failures auditable rather than mysterious
Cons
- ×Consumption billing is hard to forecast — failed attempts and wrong turns bill the same as successful ones
- ×Competing async agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor and GitHub now ship in subscriptions costing a fraction as much
- ×Still needs tightly scoped tasks; ambiguous or architecture-level work produces confident PRs that get rejected
- ×No free tier, so evaluation always costs money
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.