It's close: Raycast edges it 8.8 to 8.7, so the right pick depends on what you need. Raycast wins on 4 of the 5 scores, Cursor on 1.
Mac power users and developers who live on the keyboard
Developers who want AI help built into every part of their editor
Score by score
The details
| Feature | Raycast | Cursor |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Developer Tools | Developer Tools |
| Category rank | #4 of 8 | #5 of 8 |
| Developer | Raycast Technologies | Anysphere |
| Pricing | Free + paid plans | Free + paid plans |
| Usable for free | Yes | Yes |
| iPhone & iPad | ✓ | — |
| Mac | ✓ | ✓ |
| Windows | ✓ | ✓ |
| Linux | — | ✓ |
Strengths and weaknesses
Raycast
- Much faster and more capable than Spotlight
- Generous free tier covers most daily use
- Extension store connects many developer tools
- AI and cloud sync require a Pro plan
- Mac version is well ahead of other platforms
Raycast replaces Spotlight with a launcher that does far more: clipboard history, window management, snippets, quick calculations and a large store of community extensions for tools like GitHub, Linear and Jira. It is fast and keyboard-driven, and most of it is free. Raycast Pro adds AI chat with models from several labs, cloud sync and more. It is built for the Mac first, and other platforms are less mature.
Full Raycast 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
