Best alternatives to Cursor

Tools that overlap with Cursor on what it does, ranked by editor's pick first. Each has been tested first-hand.

Anthropic's terminal-first AI coding agent — best-in-class for long autonomous tasks and tool use.

The original AI coding assistant — broad IDE support, predictable pricing, and the deepest GitHub integration.

Open-source CLI coding agent — bring your own API key and get a power-user terminal workflow.

VS Code fork with the Cascade agent and an unusually generous free tier.