Should I choose Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code or OpenAI Codex?

The cheapest paid starting point is GitHub Copilot Pro at $10 a month; Claude Pro and ChatGPT Plus each cost $20. Cursor needs a closer look because its new-customer plans now differ from the familiar Pro and Pro+ subscriptions. Prices and plan details below reflect October 22, 2026, with US dollar monthly billing unless stated otherwise.

Start with the workflow and the bill

Copilot is the strongest budget starting point for developers who want coding assistance without committing to a replacement editor. Its paid plans include unlimited code completions and next-edit suggestions, while conversational and agent work consumes GitHub AI Credits. Cursor suits developers who want its editor and agent features together. Claude Code suits terminal-led work with Claude models. Codex suits developers who want local coding and delegated cloud work through a ChatGPT subscription.

Product	Price	Best for	Limits
Cursor Plus	$8/month	First-party model access	Base weekly pool
Cursor Premium	$30/month	Editor and cloud agents	4x Plus usage
Cursor Super	$100/month	Sustained agent work	15x Plus usage
Cursor Ultra	$200/month	Higher first-party usage	50x Plus usage
Copilot Free	$0	Occasional assistance	2,000 completions/month
Copilot Pro	$10/month	Budget individual use	1,500 AI Credits/month
Copilot Pro+	$39/month	More agent capacity	7,000 AI Credits/month
Copilot Max	$100/month	High-volume individual use	20,000 AI Credits/month
Claude Pro	$20/month	Claude Code entry	Five-hour and weekly caps
Claude Max 5x	$100/month	Longer Claude sessions	5x Pro session usage
Claude Max 20x	$200/month	Heavy Claude use	20x Pro session usage
Codex through ChatGPT Plus	$20/month	Focused coding sessions	Model-dependent allowance
Codex through ChatGPT Pro	$100, $200 or $500/month	Higher-intensity work	Tier-dependent allowance

These allowances measure different things. Cursor's multipliers apply to its own pool, Claude's multiples apply to Pro session usage, and GitHub credits reflect token and model costs. Treating any of them as a common number of completed coding jobs would produce a misleading comparison.

Cursor: distinguish new plans from legacy subscriptions

Cursor now sells new subscriptions through The X Subscription, covering Cursor, Grok and X. Free has limited Agent and Chat usage. Plus costs $8 monthly, Premium $30, Super $100 and Ultra $200. Annual prices are $80, $300, $1,000 and $2,000 respectively, before tax. Teams seats cost $30, $100 or $200 monthly, according to seat tier; Enterprise uses custom pricing.

Paid plans share a weekly allowance across Cursor and Grok. Third-party models cost extra at API list prices on Premium and above. Teams can also incur the Cursor Token Rate on eligible models. This matters if your preferred coding model comes from Anthropic or OpenAI: the subscription price alone does not cover that usage.

Plus supports Grok 4.7, Grok 4.6, Grok 4.5 and Composer 2.5 at fixed settings. It excludes third-party models, your own API keys, Cloud Agents, Automations, Bugbot and Auto. Premium adds those agent and review features, along with access to separately billed third-party models. Buy Plus only if those restrictions fit your work.

Existing subscribers have a different calculation. Legacy Hobby remains free; Pro costs $20 monthly, Pro+ $60 and Ultra $200. Legacy Teams Standard is $40 per user monthly and Teams Premium $120. Their two monthly pools separate Cursor models from other models, and eligible plans retain an included third-party allowance. Moving to The X Subscription is optional and permanent. Compare your actual model spending before giving up the legacy allowance.

Copilot: budget in AI Credits, not premium requests

GitHub's current plans use AI Credits. Old comparisons built around fixed premium-request quotas should not determine a new purchase. Free includes 2,000 monthly code completions and a limited credit allowance, with automatic model selection. Paid plans retain unlimited code completions and next-edit suggestions without charging AI Credits for those features.

Pro's $10 subscription includes 1,000 base credits plus 500 flex credits. Pro+ costs $39 and includes 3,900 base plus 3,100 flex. Max costs $100 and includes 10,000 base plus 10,000 flex. Flex allotments can change as model economics change, so distinguish the guaranteed base from the current total.

Business costs $19 per granted seat monthly and contributes 1,900 credits per user. Enterprise costs $39 and contributes 3,900. Organizational credits pool at the billing entity; additional usage costs $0.01 per credit. Enterprise requires GitHub Enterprise Cloud and is unavailable for GitHub Enterprise Server.

All plans include Copilot CLI and the Copilot app, with feature access varying by tier. Paid plans add model selection, while Business and Enterprise add centralized policy management. For a team already buying GitHub services, that administrative fit is a stronger reason to start here than a headline model score.

Claude Code: one subscription pool across Claude

Claude Code is included in Claude Pro at $20 monthly, or $200 paid annually, which Anthropic displays as approximately $17 a month. Max 5x costs $100 monthly and Max 20x costs $200. The multipliers describe usage relative to Pro within a five-hour session; they do not promise a fixed count of completed tasks.

Pro and Max also have weekly caps, and Max has a separate weekly Fable limit. Claude conversations and Claude Code draw from the same allowance. A developer doing substantial research in Claude can therefore have less coding capacity left than someone using the subscription only for repository work.

Claude Code runs in the terminal and supported IDEs. Subscription access and API billing are separate: setting an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY makes the client authenticate against the API account rather than spend the subscription allowance. Check that setting before assuming a long coding session is prepaid.

Anthropic lists Opus 5.5 at $4 per million prompt tokens, $20 per million output tokens and $0.20 per million cached-read tokens. Fast mode costs $8 prompt and $40 output per million. Optional usage credits allow continued work at API rates after subscription limits. Max's included monthly platform API credits cannot pay for extra usage inside Claude Code or the Claude apps.

Codex: ChatGPT access spans local and cloud work

Codex is available through its desktop app, CLI, IDE extension and web experience. Cloud tasks run in isolated environments, while local clients work against your development setup. Free and Go have limited trial access; Plus costs $20 monthly. OpenAI's current Pro tiers cost $100, $200 and $500 monthly, with progressively larger allowances. Pro 500 includes Ultrafast access.

ChatGPT Business Standard costs $25 per seat monthly or $20 with annual billing. Premium costs $125 monthly or $100 with annual billing, and includes five times Standard usage with no five-hour usage limit. Business requires at least two seats and permits mixing seat types. Enterprise and Edu offer credit-based arrangements.

Model choice changes capacity sharply. The current Codex table lists Plus and Standard Business allowances of 15 to 160 for GPT-6.1 Sol, compared with 350 to 3,000 for GPT-6 Luna. Local messages and cloud chats share the plan allowance; weekly limits can also apply. These are workload-dependent ranges, not a promised number of merged changes.

Eligible Pro 200 subscribers retain their previous allowance through October 29, 2026, before moving to a lower allowance at the same $200 price. A current subscriber's usage experience can therefore differ from a new buyer's. API-key access is separately metered and lacks ChatGPT-connected cloud features such as GitHub review and Slack integration.

Compare agent permissions and enterprise controls

A cloud agent needs a different security review from an inline completion tool. Cursor Premium includes Cloud Agents and Bugbot. Copilot combines IDE assistance with CLI and agent access. Claude Code brings terminal execution into its workflow. Codex connects local clients with cloud delegation and code review. Decide which permissions each workflow needs before enabling unattended changes.

For procurement, separate model training, retention and execution location. Claude's pricing comparison marks consumer plans as training opt-out and commercial plans as no-training. Its Enterprise offering includes SSO, SCIM and audit capabilities. OpenAI says Business, Enterprise and Edu data is not used for training by default; personal Codex users should check ChatGPT data controls.

Copilot Business and Enterprise offer organizational policy control. Require an administrator to approve model access and additional spending, rather than letting individual subscriptions set company policy. For any cloud workflow, agree on repository access, secret handling, outbound network permissions and who must review a proposed change. A passing test run should remain one approval condition, not the entire release decision.

Read coding benchmarks as configuration-specific results

Anthropic reports Opus 5.5 at 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, with a standard error of 2.6 percentage points. That result uses xhigh effort. Its release table also reports 54.4% on FrontierCode v1.1 Main and 57.8% on CursorBench 4.0. Anthropic warns that benchmark margins have become less reliable guides to practical differences.

SWE-bench Verified needs particular caution. In February 2026, OpenAI reported flaws in 59.4% of an audited subset of 138 difficult problems, rather than 59.4% of the entire benchmark. It also described contamination and recommended SWE-bench Pro. A model score from a particular agent configuration cannot rank these four subscriptions, their editors or their spending limits.

Use a small repository-specific evaluation before buying broadly. Ask each shortlisted setup to fix the same bug, add the same test and explain the same unfamiliar module. Record review time and total charges alongside test results. Keep model choice and permissions consistent enough that the comparison answers your team's purchasing question.

Choose by developer profile

• Individual developer watching cost: Start with Copilot Pro at $10. Unlimited completions make it a sensible baseline before paying for larger agent allowances.
• Developer committed to Cursor: Choose Premium for cloud agents and separately billed model choice. Existing Pro or Pro+ users should price the lost third-party allowance before migrating.
• Terminal-first Claude user: Start with Claude Pro. Move to Max 5x when five-hour capacity repeatedly interrupts paid work; remember that weekly limits remain.
• Existing ChatGPT subscriber: Try included Codex before adding another subscription. Compare the exact Pro tier and any grandfathered allowance before upgrading.
• Engineering manager: Compare Copilot Business with ChatGPT Business Standard on governance and actual agent spending. Use Premium or higher individual tiers selectively for developers whose measured workload needs them.