Cursor review
The best all-round coding agent we have tested — provided you are willing to live inside its editor and watch the bill.
Tested score
8.5/10
- Task completion·25%9.1
- Code quality·20%8.4
- Speed·15%8.8
- Value for money·15%7.9
- Learning curve·15%9.0
- Team & security·10%7.2
Weights are fixed for the whole category and published in How we test.
The verdict
Cursor is the tool we reach for when the job is “get this change done inside a codebase I already know.” Across the fixed task set it finished the most work unattended, wrote clean diffs a second engineer signed off on, and did it fast — the reason it tops the board this month. The one place it stumbled was the cross-service migration, where it lost the thread once the change crossed repository boundaries.
The catch is the shape of the bargain: you live inside its editor, and heavy agent use is metered, so the bill climbs with the work. If most of your week is long, cross-file refactors, read the Claude Code verdict before you buy — otherwise Cursor is the safest default for hands-on coding.
Who this is wrong for
- You want to stay in your existing editor — Cursor asks you to move into its fork of VS Code.
- Your month is mostly long-context refactors across many files — Claude Code edged it there.
- You are cost-sensitive on heavy agent use — the metered runs add up fast.
Cursor Pro — $20/mo
Commission-earning link. Score was locked on 21 Jul 2026, before terms were checked.
The test log
Same 12 tasks run against every agent in this category
| # | Task | Result | Time | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Paginate a list endpoint and wire the UI control | Passed | 11m | One prompt, no human edit to the diff. |
| 2 | Convert a React class component to hooks | Passed | 7m | Preserved lifecycle semantics; caught a stale closure. |
| 3 | Fix an N+1 query in the orders report | Passed | 9m | Added the eager-load and a regression test unprompted. |
| 4 | Cross-service migration touching auth and billing | Failed | 24m | Lost the thread across repo boundaries; needed a human to finish. |
| 5 | Add integration tests for the checkout flow | Passed | 13m | Covered the two edge cases we usually forget. |
Showing 5 of 12
Pricing at time of testing
checked 21 Jul 2026Hobby
$0
2,000 completions, 50 agent runs
Pro
$20/mo
What we tested — unlimited completions, 500 agent runs
What we testedBusiness
$40/user
SSO, no-training guarantee, admin controls
Tested by aitools.reviews
Tested · 8.5/10
AI coding agents · Jul 2026
Vendors scoring 7.5+ may embed this badge. It carries the score and the date — and it updates when we re-test.
<a href="https://aitools.reviews/reviews/cursor/" rel="nofollow sponsored">Tested by aitools.reviews · 8.5/10</a>