Cursor vs. Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cursor
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Cursor is an IDE and code editor built for programming with AI. Cursor includes an autocomplete that predicts the next edit. Once enabled, it is always on and will suggest edits to code across multiple lines.
$20
per month
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft offers Visual Studio Code, an open source text editor that supports code editing, debugging, IntelliSense syntax highlighting, and other features.
$0
Pricing
CursorMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
Editions & Modules
Pro
$20
per month
Teams
$40
per month per user
Pro+
$60
per month
Ultra
$200
per month
Enterprise
Custom
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CursorMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsEvery plan includes a set amount of model usage. Additional usage is based on the models and features used. The Bugbot add-on is available at $40 per month, per user, or with Custom pricing for Enterprise customers. A discount is available for annual billing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CursorMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
Considered Both Products
Cursor
Chose Cursor
Cursor is superior because its integration is easy; it provides the same benefits as the others, but it does so by managing LLMs in a more intuitive way. The fact that it is now proprietary to SpaceXAI might make the use of Grok more efficient and maybe cheaper for users …
Chose Cursor
Cursor has built-in AI and is a fork based on Visual Studio Code. So the fact is, it is better than Visual Studio Code because of AI, and if you are a developer that uses more than notebooks, in my opinion, it surely beats Jupyter Notebook, too. It is my go-to for basically all …
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Those are agentic IDEs, a fork of VSCode, but Visual Studio Code is used for inferior hardware and has fewer features, whereas others have more features but can't be used on those devices. So, it's the POV of the machine's config: which IDE should be used? If it has a good …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
As mentioned before, IDE's can be excellent with one thing, and the company we do a lot of things, so it's kind of annoying to have multiple programs, heavy ones to open your work, so just use one, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, personalize thanks to extensions, and you are …
Best Alternatives
CursorMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
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No answers on this topic

BBEdit
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Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies

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Vim
Vim
Score 9.8 out of 10
Enterprises

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Vim
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Score 9.8 out of 10
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User Ratings
CursorMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(10 ratings)
9.5
(104 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(2 ratings)
9.4
(2 ratings)
Usability
9.2
(10 ratings)
9.4
(21 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(23 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
CursorMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
Likelihood to Recommend
SpaceX
Less appropriate for people who don't use LLMs to code but instead to create artifacts. Cursor is a fluid development platform, not something that will create an artifact to run in the cloud. Well designed to work on teams, to manage the code and how the LLMs interact with the code itself. Great for deep vibe coding.
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Microsoft
As a general workhorse IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio Codee is unmatched. Building on the early success of applications such as Atom, it has long been the standard for electron based IDEs. It can be outshone using IDEs that are dedicated to particular platforms, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code for .net and the Jetbrains IDEs for Java, Python and others. For remote collaborative development, something like Zed is ahead of VSCode live share, which can be quite flakey.
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Pros
SpaceX
  • API creation.
  • Integrations
  • Plan mode for large tasks.
  • Refactoring.
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Microsoft
  • Integrate with the git repository very well.
  • Integrated copilot chat is very helpful to write code snippets and helps beginners to start with coding and development.
  • Great library of available extensions is one of the best features in Microsoft Visual Studio Code.
  • Dedicated Testing option to configure pytest and others are quite handy to use.
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Cons
SpaceX
  • The CLI agent can be quite finicky via ACP.
  • It can be hard to understand how much different models will cost.
  • Support can be unresponsive.
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Microsoft
  • The customization of key combinations should be more accessible and easier to change
  • The auxiliary panels could be minimized or as floating tabs which are displayed when you click on them
  • A monitoring panel of resources used by Microsoft Visual Studio Code or plugins and extensions would help a lot to be able to detect any malfunction of these
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Likelihood to Renew
SpaceX
Cursor is the best AI-powered IDE available today. The agents intelligently absorb context from the code, memory, and rules, and are capable of iterating with subagents until acceptance criteria is met.
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Microsoft
Solid tool that provides everything you need to develop most types of applications. The only reason not a 10 is that if you are doing large distributed teams on Enterprise level, Professional does provide more tools to support that and would be worth the cost.
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Usability
SpaceX
Cursor is useful for all our developer team. Each and every team member use Cursor for coding and also Cursor has various models like composer, codex, claude and openai models which helps a lot for quality codings. Also Cursor help to create documents in md file format with markdown and preview which helps a lot.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Visual Studio Code earns a 10 for its exceptional balance of power and simplicity. Its intuitive interface, robust extension ecosystem, and integrated terminal streamline development. With seamless Git integration and highly customizable settings, it adapts perfectly to any workflow, making complex coding tasks feel effortless for beginners and experts alike.
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Reliability and Availability
SpaceX
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Overall, Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty reliable. Every so often, though, the app will experience an unexplained crash. Since it is a stand-alone app, connectivity or service issues don't occur in my experience. Restarting the app seems to always get around the problem, but I do make sure to save and backup current work.
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Performance
SpaceX
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty snappy in performance terms. It launches quickly, and tasks are performed quickly. I don't have a lot of integrations other than CoPilot, but I suspect that if the integration partner is provisioned appropriately that any performance impact would be pretty minimal. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles (unless you start adding plugins left and right).
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Support Rating
SpaceX
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Active development means filing a bug on the GitHub repo typically gets you a response within 4 days. There are plugins for almost everything you need, whether it be linting, Vim emulation, even language servers (which I use to code in Scala). There is well-maintained official documentation. The only thing missing is forums. The closest thing is GitHub issues, which typically has the answers but is hard to sift through -- there are currently 78k issues.
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Alternatives Considered
SpaceX
graphical user interface is really the thing that setting apart because other code harnesses are really focused on commandline interfaces but whenever you want a good graphical interface with all of the tools and workflow that us software developers we want I think that Cursor is the one that has done it the best out of all of the code harnesses that we’ve tried
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Microsoft
Visual Studio Code stacks up nicely against Visual Studio because of the price and because it can be installed without admin rights. We don't exclusively use Visual Studio Code, but rather use Visual Studio and Visual Studio code depending on the project and which version of source control the given project is wired up to.
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Scalability
SpaceX
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
It is easily deployed with our Jamf Pro instance. There is actually very little setup involved in getting the app deployed, and it is fairly well self-contained and does not deploy a large amount of associated files. However, it is not particularly conducive to large project, multi-developer/department projects that involve some form of central integration.
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Return on Investment
SpaceX
  • Development speed increased at least 25%
  • The result of the final Product is better than before/without it
  • We use it as a standard now
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Microsoft
  • Saves money by replacing suites of tools such as Visual Studio, IntelliJ, etc.
  • Speeds development time and developer environment setup time
  • Strengthens code quality with integrated autoformatting and linting
  • Strengths Git practices by keeping version control tightly connected with the code
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ScreenShots