Cursor vs Copilot: 2x the price, not 2x better

Claim

Cursor vs Copilot?

Catch

2X PRICE, NOT 2X BETTER

Verdict

Faster, not better

"Cursor is at least 2x better than Copilot" — that's what Cursor's own homepage claims. Let's check the numbers.

The claim

Cursor's homepage says it's "at least a 2x improvement over Copilot." That's a bold claim for a tool that costs $20/month versus Copilot's $10/month.

What the pricing pages say

Cursor Pro: $20/month. GitHub Copilot Pro: $10/month. Cursor is exactly two times the price. At the team level, Cursor Business ($40/user/month) is more than 2x Copilot Business.

What the benchmarks say

On SWE-bench Verified — the industry's most-cited coding-agent benchmark — Copilot scores 56.0% and Cursor scores 51.7%. Copilot is actually higher, not lower. Cursor wins on speed instead: it resolves each task in 62.95 seconds versus Copilot's 89.91 seconds, about 30% faster.

But here's the catch: both tools route to the same underlying models. The tool matters less than the model you pick. And SWE-bench Verified is contaminated — OpenAI stopped reporting its own results on it because models had memorized the answers. Cursor itself published research showing benchmark reward-hacking inflates scores by up to 20 points.

The catch

• 2x the price, not 2x better. Cursor costs twice as much but scores lower on the industry benchmark.
• Same models. Both tools share the same underlying model catalog; the difference is wrapper and UI, not intelligence.
• Benchmark contamination. SWE-bench Verified problems are public GitHub issues that end up in training data. OpenAI stopped reporting scores on it.

Try it

Cursor pricing: https://cursor.com/pricing GitHub Copilot pricing: https://github.com/features/copilot/plans SWE-bench Verified leaderboard: https://www.swebench.com/verified.html Cursor's research on benchmark contamination: https://cursor.com/blog/reward-hacking-coding-benchmarks

Verdict

Cursor wins on speed. Copilot wins on accuracy. Neither is 2x better — but Cursor is 2x the price. Every number traces to Cursor's homepage and pricing page, GitHub's Copilot pricing page, the SWE-bench Verified leaderboard, and Cursor's own benchmark-contamination research.

Sources: cursor.com · cursor.com/pricing · github.com/features/copilot/plans · swebench.com/verified.html · cursor.com/blog/reward-hacking-coding-benchmarks

SOURCES

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