Cursor alternatives: editors, agents and who merges

Cursor is an AI code editor, and these Cursor alternatives cover other editors as well as agents you can hand work to. If you're choosing what to switch to, check Cursor's pricing as of 7 November 2026: Plus is $8/month with the restriction "Only Grok models are available on this plan"; third-party models need Premium ($30/month) or higher, or Teams, plus separate billing at "API list price". Every alternative below was checked against its own docs on that same date.

I'm Larry 🍀 Orbi, the creator of Orbi.

Orbi is in this list; I did not install or run the third-party tools for this post or purchase Cursor's paid plans, so those entries rest on their official docs. Orbi itself is not an editor: it takes GitHub Issues in the background through review, merge and release, so it sits beside an editor rather than replacing Cursor's completions.

Why people look for a Cursor alternative

The pricing page makes the model restriction worth checking before you choose a plan:

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Third-party model usage is outside the listed subscription prices. Prices exclude applicable taxes and fees. If model access is why you are considering a switch, compare the subscription and the separate usage charge together.

The yardstick

I use four questions to choose between these tools:

• Where do you work: in an editor or terminal, or by handing a task to a background agent?
• Which models can you use, and do you pay through a subscription, usage billing or your own API key?
• Does the workflow open a pull request (PR), or leave that step to you?
• Who merges the reviewed change, and who starts and publishes a release?

Cursor alternatives for your editor or terminal

GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot's plans include Free with 2,000 completions per month, Pro at $10/month and Pro+ at $39/month. Assigning work to Copilot to create a PR starts with Pro; Free does not include that handoff. One subscription covers editor completions and GitHub task assignment, but read the cloud agent's approval restrictions below before you count on the second.

Devin Desktop, formerly Windsurf

Devin Desktop is the new name for Windsurf. Its docs describe sessions on your machine or in Devin Cloud, with the same context carried between them. Devin Free costs $0 and includes a light agent quota and unlimited Tab completions; Pro is $20/month and adds Devin Cloud access.

Zed

Zed Personal is $0, with unlimited use through your own API keys or external agents, so on that plan the cost that matters is your model provider's bill. Zed is open source. Pro costs $10/month and includes $5 of tokens.

Cline

Cline has an editor extension, including support for Cursor, plus a CLI and desktop app. Its source is Apache-2.0 licensed. Model access can use Cline usage billing, ClinePass at $9.99/month, or bring your own key (BYOK). The overview says, "Every action requires your explicit approval."

Claude Code

Claude Code is a terminal agent with IDE extensions for VS Code and JetBrains; the overview includes an install link for Cursor itself. Most surfaces require a Claude subscription or Anthropic Console account. For the account and workflow comparison, read Cursor vs Claude Code.

Cursor alternatives that work in the background

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Cursor's own cloud agents, as a baseline

Before switching products, compare Cursor's cloud agents. They require Premium or higher and run in isolated cloud VMs. They work on a separate branch and push changes to your repository for handoff. Origin is Cursor's own code hosting, listed on its pricing page as "Code hosting via Origin" from Premium up. On a repository hosted there, an agent can ask a person to approve a merge and then land that exact commit, according to the cloud agents release notes for the week of 7 September 2026; the docs do not describe a merge without that approval, and for a GitHub repository they describe the branch handoff. If all you want is execution off your own machine, this route lets you stay on Cursor.

GitHub Copilot cloud agent

Copilot cloud agent access starts at Pro ($10/month), with Pro+ at $39/month. Its security documentation says it "cannot approve or merge a pull request". By default, a person with write access must review the code and click "Approve and run workflows" before workflows run. The person who requested the PR cannot submit the approving PR review. That suits a team that wants the agent to stop at a PR and has reviewers on hand for those approvals. The Orbi vs GitHub Copilot coding agent page compares the two side by side.

Devin Cloud

Devin Cloud is available from Pro at $20/month. The Desktop documentation describes moving sessions between your machine and the cloud while retaining context. Orbi vs Devin covers what else Devin's docs say.

Orbi

Label a GitHub Issue ai-ready and Orbi runs Pi, an open-source coding agent, to implement it. A second Pi session that did not write the code reviews it, and the Orbi runner (on your machine if you self-host, or Orbi Cloud's hosted runner) merges the reviewed commit once your CI passes. No person signs off on that merge by default; if your branch protection requires a human approval, Orbi stops at ai-awaiting-merge and the Issue comment names the action. A person starts a release by commenting /orbi milestone <version> on an Issue; Orbi then opens the release ticket, tags and publishes. Self-hosted Orbi is free under AGPL-3.0 with your own model key. Orbi Cloud is the hosted version; its monthly and yearly plans are listed on that page, and the first 3 merged deliveries (an Issue whose PR Orbi merged) are free with no card required. It fits a team that wants Issues carried through review and merge while a person still decides when to release. If you want inline completions, Orbi does not replace Cursor.

One Issue to a release, timed

In orbi-build/orbi#2123, Orbi stopped updating a GitHub Actions variable in repositories it delivers to: ORBI_ACTIVE_MILESTONE. The change became PR #2124 and was included in v0.7.38. All times below are UTC on 6 November 2026.

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app/orbi-build and orbi-build[bot] are two spellings GitHub uses for the same Orbi GitHub App.

From the ai-ready label, the Issue was claimed after 2 min 49 s, the PR opened after 46 min 15 s, and the PR merged after 61 min 30 s. A person typed the release command about 1 h 47 min after the merge, as a comment on #2125, the Issue where Orbi asked to confirm the next milestone; the record does not say why the gap was that long. From that command to the published release took 19 min 31 s.

The merge comment on the Issue records Orbi's review verdict: "pass, no findings" in 1 round. The PR's CI checks passed: tests in 6m31s, macos-compatibility in 6m51s and link in 4s.

The PR touched 19 files (+230 −308). The source change is +7 −77 across 5 files under src/orbi/, and the rest is tests, a CI triage tool and the docs in English and Chinese. It is not an average or a prediction for another task.

To reproduce the timeline from GitHub, use this script. Paste it into a file and run it with bash; it needs the GitHub CLI logged in.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Print the Issue -> PR -> release timeline of one Orbi delivery (UTC timestamps from GitHub).
set -euo pipefail
R=orbi-build/orbi
gh issue view 2123 -R $R --json number,title,author,createdAt,closedAt \
  -q '"issue  #\(.number) opened \(.createdAt) by \(.author.login) closed \(.closedAt) | \(.title)"'
gh api "repos/$R/issues/2123/events" --paginate \
  -q '.[] | select(.event=="labeled") | "label  \(.label.name) \(.created_at) by \(.actor.login)"'
gh pr view 2124 -R $R --json number,author,createdAt,mergedAt,mergedBy,headRefOid \
  -q '"pr     #\(.number) opened \(.createdAt) by \(.author.login) merged \(.mergedAt) by \(.mergedBy.login)"'
gh api "repos/$R/pulls/2124/reviews" -q '.[] | "review \(.state) \(.submitted_at) by \(.user.login) commit \(.commit_id[0:7])"'
gh issue view 2125 -R $R --json comments \
  -q '.comments[] | select(.body|startswith("/orbi milestone")) | "human  \(.body) \(.createdAt) by \(.author.login) on #2125"'
gh issue view 2126 -R $R --json number,author,createdAt,closedAt \
  -q '"issue  #\(.number) (release task) opened \(.createdAt) by \(.author.login) closed \(.closedAt)"'
gh release view v0.7.38 -R $R --json tagName,publishedAt,author \
  -q '"release \(.tagName) published \(.publishedAt) by \(.author.login)"'

The PR reviews call prints nothing for this delivery: Orbi posts its review verdict as Issue comments. An empty reviews line therefore does not mean the separate review session was skipped. If an Issue is missing, set -euo pipefail makes the script stop with a non-zero exit status.

Free and open-source Cursor alternatives

Free plans and open-source licenses answer different budget questions:

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How to choose

• Completions while you edit: evaluate Copilot, Devin Desktop or Zed.
• Keep your editor and change the agent: try Cline or Claude Code's IDE extension, including inside Cursor.
• Hand off background work: compare Cursor cloud agents and Copilot cloud agent; consider Devin Cloud for moving sessions between local and cloud work.
• Have the runner merge after review and CI, then publish when you send a release command: evaluate Orbi.

Related

• Orbi vs Cursor
• Cursor vs Claude Code
• Orbi Cloud