Best Cursor alternatives
Why people switch
Cursor is a VS Code fork, so its listing marks it wrong for teams committed to JetBrains or any other editor. Since August 14, 2026 it has also been a wholly owned SpaceXAI subsidiary rather than an independent startup, which matters to anyone who picked it for vendor independence. Heavy users are the third group: Pro is $20/mo, but meaningfully more third-party model usage means Pro+ at $60/mo or Ultra at $200/mo.
1. GitHub Copilot
Free tier · from $10/mo
The editor-agnostic, cheaper pick: inline completions in any major IDE, JetBrains included, at $10/user/mo, with a free tier of 2,000 completions and 50 chat requests a month. Pro now layers usage credits on top of the flat fee for premium models. You give up Cursor's multi-file refactors, where agentic tools are well ahead of Copilot.
- Free tier
- 2,000 code completions/mo, 50 chat requests/mo, access to Haiku 4.5/GPT-5 mini, no card required
- Entry paid plan
- $10/user/mo
2. Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf)
Free · from $20/mo
The closest like-for-like, now renamed Devin Desktop: a VS Code-derived editor with a whole-repo agent loop, unlimited Tab autocomplete on every tier including Free, and Pro at the same $20/mo. It runs several model families, so you are not tied to one provider. It does not solve the JetBrains problem, and it is owned by Cognition, so it is not an independence play either.
- Free tier
- Unlimited Tab autocomplete plus a light Devin Local agentic usage quota (reported as roughly 25 Flow Actions/month or 2-3 days of active agentic coding, sources disagree on the exact mechanic), no premium model access
- Entry paid plan
- Pro, $20/month (raised from $15/month around March 2026, before the June 2026 Devin Desktop rebrand), unlocks premium/frontier models and a larger daily/weekly Devin Local quota than Free
3. Claude Code
From $20/mo (Claude Pro)
For developers who want repo-wide agent work without changing editors: it runs in the terminal, your existing IDE, the web and your phone, handling multi-file refactors and fixing test failures in a loop. It needs Claude Pro at $20/mo ($17/mo billed annually) and has no free tier. It is the wrong tool if inline autocomplete is what you actually use.
- Free tier
- None: the free Claude.ai plan does not include Claude Code, only a small one-time API credit on a new Console account
- Entry paid plan
- $20/mo (Claude Pro, $17/mo billed annually), shares a 5-hour rolling + weekly usage pool with Claude.ai chat
4. Cline
Free, you pay your own model costs
The open-source exit from Cursor: Cline is a free VS Code extension rather than a fork, runs on your own API key with any model provider, and shows every action for approval before it runs, with no vendor margin on top. Its Enterprise tier adds JetBrains support. The trade is that you absorb the token bill directly, so costs are not flat and predictable the way Cursor's $20/mo Pro is.
- Free tier
- The extension itself is entirely free; you supply your own model API key and pay that provider directly
- Entry paid plan
- No required paid tier; optional ClinePass at $9.99/mo bundles curated open-weight models with higher rate limits
Detailed head-to-heads
The full field
These are the strongest switches, not the whole category. All 7 Coding & Dev tools we track are ranked by entry price on the Coding & Dev pricing page.
SearchAll.ai does not sell any of these tools and has no stake in which of these you choose. Some outbound links are affiliate links, marked sponsored; several tools on this page pay us nothing at all. Affiliate status never affects which alternatives we recommend or the order they appear in.