Compare Cursor and GitHub Copilot free tiers side by side. Pricing, limits, change history, and risk assessment for developers.

Cursor vs GitHub Copilot

Side-by-side free tier comparison. Catalogue dates here run to 2026-09-24.

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Verdict

Both Cursor and GitHub Copilot offer free tiers. Cursor provides "Free" while GitHub Copilot offers "Free". Cursor has a more stable pricing history (1 recorded change vs 8).

A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn, a product retired — does not lapse with time. A badge carrying a date states the record it rests on; a badge with no date rests on no record in force.

Cursor

Riskstable
CategoryAI Coding
TierFree
Verified2026-09-24
Last read2026-09-24
Changes1 recorded
AI-powered code editor built on VS Code. Hobby is the free plan: no credit card required, limited Agent requests, access to Composer — cursor.com/pricing states no completion or request figure for it. Individual paid plans: Pro $20/month, Pro+ $60/month (3x Pro's Agent limits), Ultra $200/month (20x). Teams is $40/user/month for a Standard seat or $120/user/month for a Premium seat (5x Standard's Agent limits). Enterprise is custom-priced with pooled usage, invoice/PO billing and SCIM. Cursor renders only the selected tier's price in the page body.

GitHub Copilot

CategoryAI Coding
TierFree
Verified2026-07-10
Last read2026-09-12
Changes8 recorded
AI coding assistant by GitHub. Copilot Free is $0 with no credit card: 2,000 code completions a month, a limited monthly allowance of GitHub AI Credits for chat and agent features, and models through auto model selection only. Copilot Student is free for verified students. Paid plans include a monthly allowance of AI credits: Pro $10 (1,500 credits), Pro+ $39 (7,000) and Max $100 (20,000); Business $19 (1,900) and Enterprise $39 (3,900) per seat. Code completions are unlimited on paid plans, and usage beyond an allowance costs $0.01 per AI credit.

Pricing Change History

Cursor

restructured effective 2025-06-16 medium impact
Cursor moved Pro from 500 requests a month to usage-based pricing and introduced a $200/month Ultra tier. Source ↗

GitHub Copilot

restricted effective 2026-06-24 medium impact
GitHub limited Copilot Free and Copilot Student to auto model selection, so Free users can no longer choose which model answers. Source ↗
restructured effective 2026-06-01 high impact
GitHub retired premium requests and now bills every Copilot plan in GitHub AI Credits. Copilot Free kept 2,000 code completions a month, and its 50 chat and agent requests a month became an allowance of AI credits. Plan prices did not change: Pro at $10 a month now includes $15 of usage and Pro+ at $39 includes $70, and the new Max plan is $100 with $200. Source ↗
restricted effective 2026-04-22 high impact
No longer in force (2026-09-01). GitHub paused new self-serve signups for Copilot Business by organizations on GitHub Free and GitHub Team plans, two days after the pause on individual plans. Existing Copilot Business customers were unaffected and could keep adding seats. Copilot Enterprise was not named in the announcement. Reversed: GitHub's 2026-08-28 changelog states "Starting September 1, 2026, GitHub will start reenabling sign-ups for new Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise customers paying by credit card or PayPal." The pause announcement is marked Retired. Source ↗
restricted effective 2026-04-20 high impact
No longer in force (2026-06-17). GitHub paused new signups for Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Copilot Student plans citing infrastructure strain from agentic AI workflows (long-running, parallelized sessions overwhelming capacity). Existing users are unaffected. Free tier signups remain open. Same announcement also removed Claude Opus from Pro (now Pro+ only) and tightened usage limits on individual plans. Reversed: GitHub reopened sign-ups for Copilot Student, Pro, Pro+ and Max from 2026-06-17 ("We're reopening sign-ups for GitHub Copilot Student, Pro, Pro+, and Max plans gradually over the next couple of weeks"), and its changelog post for this change is marked Retired. A separate pause dated 2026-04-22 covered new self-serve signups for Copilot Business by organizations on GitHub Free and GitHub Team plans, and did not cover Copilot Enterprise; GitHub reenabled signups for new Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise customers paying by credit card or PayPal from 2026-09-01. Source ↗
restricted effective 2026-04-10 medium impact
No longer in force (2026-09-02). GitHub paused new Copilot Pro trials due to abuse. Existing trials continued through their term. New users could still subscribe to Pro directly (paid) until the broader April 20 signup pause closed that path too. Resolved: Copilot Pro is open to new subscribers, verified 2026-09-02 against GitHub's plans documentation. Source ↗

Showing the 5 most recent of 8 recorded changes for GitHub Copilot.

Watch Both Vendors for Pricing Changes

We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.

curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=Cursor curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Cursor curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=GitHub%20Copilot curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=GitHub%20Copilot

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