Both companies moved to metered model usage in 2026, so the sticker price is now a floor rather than a bill. We ran the same three working days on both plans and read the meters instead of the marketing pages.
Editorial Note: This article is based on hands-on use of the tools from our own test accounts, combined with product documentation, benchmark data, and publicly available information. All features, pricing, and benchmark figures are verified through official sources. See our Disclaimer.
GitHub Copilot Pro costs $10 a month and Cursor Pro costs $20, and on the published figures Copilot includes more model usage per dollar at every tier the two companies let you compare. The caveat is that neither price is a bill any more. Copilot replaced premium requests with GitHub AI Credits on 1 June 2026 — 1,500 of them on Pro, at a fixed $0.01 per credit — and Cursor bills agent work against two usage pools at each model’s API list price. We ran the same three working days on both plans from 13 to 15 October 2026 and logged what came off each meter.
The readings: Copilot spent 438 of its 1,500 credits ($4.38 of model usage) producing 43 changes we kept. Cursor spent $13.60 of its $20 third-party pool producing 47, because we had it pinned to a frontier Claude model and that pool is billed at Anthropic’s rates. Same work, same days, roughly three times the metered cost — and the reason is model choice, not the subscription. Re-run the same three days on Cursor’s own Composer model and the third-party pool is never touched.
| Question | Cursor | GitHub Copilot | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Pro $20/mo ($16 yearly) | Pro $10/mo | Copilot — half the price |
| Included usage on that plan | $20 third-party pool at API rates, plus an unpublished first-party pool | 1,500 AI credits ($15 of model usage) | Copilot — the only published ratio |
| Completions billed against the meter | No — Tab is unlimited on paid plans | No — completions are not credit-billed and stay unlimited | Level |
| When the month’s usage runs out | On-demand usage in arrears (off by default, spend cap optional); some pools fall back to first-party models | Buy more credits at $0.01 each | Copilot — published rate |
| Best plan for a five-person team | Teams $40/user Standard, $120 Premium | Business $19/user (1,900 credits each) | Copilot — less than half |
| Free for students | No — the free year for Pro closed to new sign-ups on 25 June 2026 | Yes — Copilot Pro at no cost via GitHub Education | Copilot — decisive |
| Our verdict | Buy it when the agent is the product | Buy it when cost and predictability matter | Copilot for most readers |
Almost every comparison you will find still quotes the 2025 models, and on both vendors those numbers have expired. GitHub’s own plan documentation states that premium requests ended on 1 June 2026 and were replaced by GitHub AI Credits, with code completions and next edit suggestions explicitly excluded from credit billing and left unlimited on paid plans. Copilot Pro+ rose from $20 to $39 a month on 6 July 2026, and a new $100 Max tier appeared above it. The old Pro+ price is still quoted widely.
Cursor moved the other way: it no longer publishes a dollar figure for included usage on its lower plans, Bugbot became usage-based in May 2026, Auto stopped being a free unlimited lane — an Auto request now bills at the list price of whichever model it routes to — and the free year of Pro for students closed to new sign-ups on 25 June 2026. If a table shows “300 premium requests” or says Cursor is free for students, it is describing a product that no longer exists.
Prices are US dollars, month to month, checked on 16 October 2026 at cursor.com/pricing and in GitHub’s Copilot plan documentation.
| Tier | Cursor | GitHub Copilot | What you get for it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Hobby $0 — limited agent requests, Composer access, no card | Free $0 — 2,000 completions and 50 chats a month, auto model only | Both are evaluation tiers; Copilot’s gives you more chat |
| Entry paid | Pro $20/mo | Pro $10/mo, free for students | Unlimited completions on both; Cursor adds cloud agents and Bugbot |
| Mid | Pro+ $60/mo — 3× Pro’s agent limits | Pro+ $39/mo — 7,000 credits | Copilot is cheaper and the allowance is a published number |
| Top individual | Ultra $200/mo — 20× limits, highest Bugbot allowance | Max $100/mo — 20,000 credits | Cursor gives the larger absolute allowance at twice the price |
| Team seat | Teams $40/user, Premium $120/user | Business $19/user, Enterprise $39/user | Copilot seats cost half, and enterprise usage pools |
GitHub publishes the exchange rate, which makes this arithmetic possible: one AI credit is $0.01 of model usage, so Copilot Pro’s 1,500 credits are $15 of usage for a $10 plan — a ratio of 1.5. Pro+ is $39 for 7,000 credits, or $70 of usage (1.8), and Max is $100 for 20,000 credits, or $200 of usage (2.0). Assume the base allotment rather than the total: GitHub describes the 500-credit flex portion on Pro as something that adapts as model economics change, so it can go down.
Cursor does not publish an equivalent number, and where it does give you a figure it does so through the third-party pool: $20 of Anthropic, OpenAI and Google model usage on Pro, $70 on Pro+, and $400 on Ultra. Read as a ratio of usage to price, Pro is 1.0, Pro+ is 1.17 and Ultra is 2.0. That is the same as Copilot Max — and, notably, the only tier where Cursor hands back more model usage than you pay for. Everything else is subsidised through Cursor’s own Composer and Grok models, which draw on a separate pool that Cursor describes only as generous. Its own guidance is that daily Tab users stay inside Pro, limited agent users usually do, and daily agent users typically spend $60 to $100 a month in total.
Teams are where the two price lists diverge most: five seats cost $95 a month on Copilot Business at $19 each, against $200 on Cursor Teams at $40 each. The Copilot seat carries 1,900 credits that pool across the organisation, so a quiet teammate’s allowance can cover a loud one’s overtime; Cursor’s allowance is per user, cannot be shared, and on-demand usage is on by default with no per-member ceiling below Enterprise.
Pick the cheap model for mechanical work. On Cursor the spread is brutal: Composer 2.5 costs $0.50 per million input tokens against $4 for Claude Opus 5.5, so a rename or a formatting pass on a frontier model is eight times the price for the same diff. On Copilot, default to the included models for anything you would not describe as hard.
Leave on-demand usage switched off until you need it, and set the cap. Both vendors keep going after the included allowance is spent, and neither slows you down to warn you. Cursor’s on-demand billing arrives after the month ends; Copilot’s overage arrives at a fixed $0.01 a credit. A cap converts a surprise into a hard stop.
For the capability side of this trade, with session-level numbers rather than invoices, see our Cursor vs Copilot comparison and the best AI pair programming tool ranking. If you are still deciding whether the editor is worth its price at all, is Cursor worth it works through the break-even point in minutes per month.
Copilot, at every tier you can compare. Pro is $10 against Cursor Pro at $20, Pro+ is $39 against $60, Max is $100 against Ultra at $200, and a Business seat is $19 against a Teams seat at $40. Copilot also publishes what its allowance is worth — 1,500 credits, or $15 of model usage, on a $10 plan — while Cursor does not publish a figure for its included first-party usage at all. Cheaper is not the same as better, and our Cursor vs Copilot comparison is where that gets argued.
Yes. GitHub’s plan documentation states that premium requests ended on 1 June 2026 and were replaced by GitHub AI Credits, which are spent by anything that calls a model: chat, agent mode, the CLI, the cloud coding agent and spaces. Code completions and next edit suggestions are not billed in credits and remain unlimited on every paid plan, so if your day is mostly Tab completion, Copilot Pro is effectively unlimited for $10.
Because the third-party pool is billed at each vendor’s API list price while Copilot sells discounted credits at a fixed rate. We pinned Cursor to a frontier Claude model for the test and it spent $13.60 of a $20 pool producing 47 changes; Copilot spent 438 of 1,500 credits, $4.38, producing 43. Pinning Cursor to Composer 2.5 or Grok instead keeps ordinary refactors and renames inside the first-party pool at a fraction of the rate, and nothing comes out of the third-party allowance.
Copilot Pro at $10 a month is the better purchase, and Cursor Pro at $20 is the better tool to spend it on when the agent is the reason you are there. On price, predictability and the routes that cost nothing, Copilot wins everything that is comparable: half the entry price, published credit values, unlimited completions that never touch the meter, $19 team seats, and a free-for-students path that Cursor has withdrawn. Anyone who mostly wants completions and occasional chat should stop reading here and go and buy it.
Cursor Pro earns its extra $10 only if you use the agent daily, and the trap is that the $20 is a floor: pin frontier models for everything and our three days projected to a $136 month, while switching to Composer for the mechanical half of the work fits the same three days inside the plan. Our Cursor refactoring workflow covers that model discipline.
13 to 15 October 2026 — three full working days on one 11,400-line TypeScript and React billing console with 254 Jest tests and 61 Playwright tests, green before every session. Both plans ran on the same machine against the same repository, on the same four tasks in the same order, with a fresh branch per task. GitHub Copilot Pro ran on the $10 plan using auto model selection; Cursor Pro ran on the $20 plan deliberately pinned to a frontier third-party model as the worst case, then re-run on Composer 2.5. We read the balances out of each vendor’s own dashboard: Copilot’s credit meter and Cursor’s usage pools. These are two accounts, not vendor benchmarks — your model choice moves these figures more than your plan does.
| Metric | GitHub Copilot Pro | Cursor Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Plan price of the tier tested | $10/mo — free for verified students ✓ | $20/mo ($16 billed yearly) |
| Meter after three days of identical work | 438 of 1,500 AI credits — $4.38 of usage ✓ | $13.60 of the $20 third-party pool |
| Metered cost per change we kept | $0.10 ✓ | $0.29 |
| Changes we kept across the four tasks | 43 | 47 ✓ |
| Completions billed against the meter | 0 — not credit-billed, unlimited ✓ | 0 — Tab is unlimited on paid plans ✓ |
| Cost of the same work on the vendor’s own cheap model | Included models — 0 extra credits ✓ | $0 extra only when pinned to Composer 2.5 or Grok |
| Projected monthly bill if every day looked like these three | $38.80 — $10 plan plus 2,880 credits of overage ✓ | $136 — $20 plan plus $116 of third-party overage |
| Entry price for a verified student | $0 ✓ | $20 — the free Pro year closed to new sign-ups on 25 June 2026 |
| Per-seat price for a small team | $19/user, 1,900 credits pooled ✓ | $40/user Standard, $120 Premium, per-seat and unshareable |
| Cheapest way to stay inside the plan | Stay on auto or the included models | Pin Composer 2.5 or Grok so agent runs never touch the metered pool ✓ |
| Winner | 🏆 GitHub Copilot Pro — half the price, $0.10 per kept change, free for students | Cursor Pro — more changes per day and the best agent, at three times the metered cost as tested |
Copilot Pro cost us $4.38 of model usage for three days of real work against Cursor’s $13.60, publishes what its allowance is worth, and is free for verified students. If the repository-indexed agent is why you are paying at all, Cursor Pro is still the better tool — just keep it on Composer or Grok.
Keep exploring — these related comparisons and guides help you decide.