How Is Claude Code Different From Cursor?
Main differences between Claude Code and Cursor, in terms of pricing, performance and user experience.
I received a lot of questions recently about Claude Code, specifically how is it different from Cursor?
As someone who have used Cursor for over a year, and Claude Code for over 3 months, I do have some thoughts on the topic.
In this post, I will go through the key differences between them: pricing, performance and user experience.
Pricing and Value
The pricing models for these two tools have become quite different recently.
Cursor's entry-level Pro plan is $20 a month, which now provides $20 in API credits, in its new API usage-based pricing. Once you use up that credit, you have to pay for additional usage based on API costs.
This is a big change from their older model based on the number of requests, which was heavily subsidized by Cursor. Cursor used to give discounts for Claude Sonnet 4 at 0.5x request each, so with 500 monthly requests, you can get 1000 Claude Sonnet 4 requests. Now with the new pricing, it is just “225 Sonnet 4 requests”.
On the other hand, Anthropic recently started to offer Claude Code as part of its subscriptions, with the cheapest Claude Pro plan at $20 a month.
As of now:
Claude Code pricing offers more usage and better value than Cursor.
It is very obvious that Anthropic is “subsidizing” the API cost for users.
This is ironic because just a few months ago, Cursor was the one doing heavy subsidies, and Claude Code was the one charging for raw API costs. Now it is completely flipped around.
Anthropic can afford to do this because it owns the Claude models, and likely have lower internal costs of operating them as compared to Cursor, which has to pay for (presumably privately negotiated) API pricing.
I've personally gotten about $150 of API usage from my $20 plan in June 2025. And that’s despite me being on holiday and didn’t use Claude Code everyday.
There are also a lot of people reporting similar observations, like getting $300 API usage out of $100 Claude Max plan.
Capabilities and Performance
When it comes to raw coding ability, the general consensus is that Claude Code is more capable.
The main reason seems to be how Claude Code understands your project's context.
Claude Code uses agentic search to understand your entire codebase, while Cursor relies on embedding models and compressed context. This means Claude Code can maintain better awareness of your project structure and dependencies.
Additionally, Claude Code has no tool call limits, allowing it to work on complex tasks for extended periods, where Cursor limits the number of tool calls to 25 per session by default.
From my own experience, Claude Code can work on a complex task for over 10 minutes without getting lost. In contrast, Cursor sometimes struggles with maintaining context or hits internal tool call limits after about five minutes.
This means:
Claude Code can handle larger and more complex task more effectively than Cursor.
User Experience & Code Review
There is one area that Cursor still has the edge over Claude Code right now:
Cursor's biggest advantage is the IDE user experience for reviewing the code changes.
As Nick Dobos mentioned on X, Cursor is great at showing diffs and reviewing changes. Others also agree that Claude Code's command-line interface has a worse user experience in this regard.
However, there is a simple way to improve this: I run Claude Code inside the terminal of my Cursor editor. Once a task is done, I use the source control tab of Cursor (or VS Code) to see all the modified files.
From there, I can easily open each file as a change diff (or as a normal file) to review the changes before committing. It’s not as nice and polished as Cursor’s native inline diffs, but it gets the job done.
It's also worth mentioning that Cursor, as an IDE, has support for smart tab completion. In fact Cursor has the best tab completion on the market, with predictive jumping across files. Claude Code, as a cli tool, does not give you such capabilities.
Which One Should You Use?
My honest recommendation is to subscribe to both Claude Code and Cursor at the $20 a month.
This gives you a lot of usage credits at competitive pricing and the best of both worlds for cli coding agent and IDE tab completion.
Another benefit is redundancy. When one service hits its limits, you can switch to the other.
Having both subscriptions also lets you stay up-to-date with the latest improvements from both companies. It's good to keep exploring different tools, in case new improvements from one company make it better than the competitor.
Want to see how I use Claude Code personally?
I am doing a livestream this weekend (Saturday, 12 July) on YouTube, where I will demo how I use Claude Code to build live production apps like 16x Prompt and 16x Eval.
You will get to see exactly what my workflow is, and how I use Claude Code to build my own products.
Get notified by clicking on the YouTube livestream button below, and hit the notification bell:
You can also read my previous post on my Claude Code workflow and personal tips.