Cursor vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cursor
Score 9.4 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
Visual Studio
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Visual Studio (now in the 2022 edition) is a 64-bit IDE that makes it easier to work with bigger projects and complex workloads, boasting a fluid and responsive experience for users. The IDE features IntelliCode, its automatic code completion tools that understand code context and that can complete up to a whole line at once to drive accurate and confident coding.
$45
per month
Pricing
CursorMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
Pro
$20
per month
Teams
$40
per month per user
Pro+
$60
per month
Ultra
$200
per month
Enterprise
Custom
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CursorVisual Studio
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
Considered Both Products
Cursor
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 …
Visual Studio

No answer on this topic

Best Alternatives
CursorMicrosoft Visual Studio
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PyCharm
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All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CursorMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(2 ratings)
9.0
(105 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
6.9
(2 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
User Testimonials
CursorMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
Anysphere, Inc.
It is great for non-coders who have some technology knowledge and are comfortable following Cursor's instructions to build and deploy a webapp. Good prompting skills are needed. It is not for those who are not comfortable looking at raw codes. Cursor also is not very creative when it comes to user interface design.
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Microsoft
It's useful for app development, debugging, and testing. I've been using it for two years and have seen it grow into a fantastic tool. All of the features, NuGet packages, and settings that enable different types of projects are fantastic. It also has a connection to Azure DevOps and Git. It's a fantastic product that's simple to use.
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Pros
Anysphere, Inc.
  • state-of-art IDE
  • Best LLMs one click away
  • Code suggestions very easy to use
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Microsoft
  • Since Microsoft offers a free Community Edition of the IDE many of our new developers have used it at home or school and are very familiar with the user interface, requiring little training to move up to the paid, enterprise-friendly editions we use.
  • The online community support for Visual Studio is outstanding, as solid or better than any other commercial or open-source project software.
  • Microsoft continuously keeps the product up to date and has maintained a history of doing so. They use it internally for their own development so there is little chance it will ever fall out of favor and become unsupported.
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Cons
Anysphere, Inc.
  • Very complex user interface
  • As it generate codes for additional features, it sometimes affects existing funtions
  • Black interface hard to read
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Microsoft
  • Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive.
  • Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link.
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Likelihood to Renew
Anysphere, Inc.
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.
Read full review
Usability
Anysphere, Inc.
Really easy to use; we've been replacing all other IDEs for it now. As it is a fork of Visual Studio Code, we transitioned to it in a very smooth way, and now our development process is faster than ever. It supports a bunch of languages and we don't need to have a webpage with an LLM open now because it is all with Cursor.
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Microsoft
The thing I like the most is Visual Studio doesn't suffer from Microsoft's over eager marketing department who feel they need to redesign the UI (think Office and windows) which forces users to loose large amounts of productivity having to learn software that they had previously known.
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Support Rating
Anysphere, Inc.
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Between online forums like StackOverflow, online documentation, MSDN forums, and the customer support options, I find it very easy to get support for Visual Studio IDE when I need it. If desired, one can also download the MSDN documentation about the IDE and have it readily available for any support needs.
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Alternatives Considered
Anysphere, Inc.
Softr's chat AI is less sophisticated. However, it is great for building simple database-driven webapps. I have used it together with Airtable to build a very simple webapp. It is drag and drop. Vercel V0's chatAI is faster and more friendly. The user interface is also more visually appealing and user friendly. It is comparable to Cursor though I have only used V0 briefly so have not gone through the learning curve.
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Microsoft
I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.
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Return on Investment
Anysphere, Inc.
  • 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
  • We've had hundreds of hours saved by the rapid development that Visual Studio provides.
  • We've lost some time in the Xamarin updates. However, being cross platform, we ultimately saved tons of time not having to create separate apps for iOS and Android.
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ScreenShots