GitHub is the better app overall, scoring 9.0 to 8.7. GitHub wins on 3 of the 5 scores, Cursor on 2.
Developers and teams who want hosting, code review and CI in one place
Developers who want AI help built into every part of their editor
Score by score
The details
| Feature | GitHub | Cursor |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Developer Tools | Developer Tools |
| Category rank | #2 of 8 | #5 of 8 |
| Developer | GitHub (Microsoft) | Anysphere |
| Pricing | Free + paid plans | Free + paid plans |
| Usable for free | Yes | Yes |
| iPhone & iPad | ✓ | — |
| Android | ✓ | — |
| Mac | ✓ | ✓ |
| Windows | ✓ | ✓ |
| Linux | — | ✓ |
| Web | ✓ | — |
Strengths and weaknesses
GitHub
- Industry-standard home for code and open source
- Actions automates builds, tests and deploys
- Generous free plan with unlimited private repos
- Feature sprawl makes settings hard to navigate
- Outages can stall your whole team's workflow
GitHub is the default home for open source and many company codebases, and its tools are hard to beat. Pull requests, code review, Issues and Projects cover the full workflow, and Actions runs your builds and deployments. Copilot adds AI code review and a coding agent that can open pull requests for you. Private repos are free. The catch is growing complexity, and an outage can stall your whole team.
Full GitHub review
Cursor
- Deep AI help built into every part of the editor
- Familiar VS Code base with easy migration
- Choice of frontier models from several labs
- Usage-based pricing can be hard to predict
- Code is processed by cloud AI models
Cursor is the AI code editor many developers switch to first. It is built on VS Code, so your extensions and settings carry over, and it adds fast tab completion, an agent that edits across many files, and cloud agents that work in the background. The catch is pricing: usage-based limits can be hard to predict, and your code is processed in the cloud, so use Privacy Mode for sensitive work.
Full Cursor review
