Cursor Alternatives (2026): 12 Tools by Why You're Leaving

Why people leave Cursor in 2026

Three things changed at Cursor this year, and each sends people looking for Cursor alternatives. SpaceX completed its purchase of Cursor on August 14, 2026 (Cursor's announcement). On October 12, The X Subscription replaced Cursor's plans for new customers with one bundle for Grok, Cursor and X. And OpenAI told SpaceX it would wind down its model contract, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026.

cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing

Before you leave, check which plan you're on. Cursor's legacy plans page says Pro ($20), Pro+ ($60) and the old Ultra keep working with two monthly pools, one of them for outside models like Claude, and that switching to The X Subscription is optional and permanent. If Claude is why you use Cursor, staying on Pro may beat moving. Our Claude Code vs Cursor guide works through what Claude costs inside Cursor now.

The other reasons are older: staying in VS Code or JetBrains, preferring a terminal agent, wanting open source or local models, or paying nothing.

Cursor alternatives at a glance, by reason

The best Cursor alternatives for you sit in your reason's row; the rows aren't a ranking, and the tools inside a row are in no order.

USD a month unless stated, from each vendor's pricing page on October 27, 2026.

If you want a Cursor-style editor for less

Devin Desktop and Kiro are the closest swaps: desktop AI editors on a VS Code base, like Cursor, with agents that can also run in the cloud.

Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf). Cognition calls it the next generation of Windsurf, launched June 2, 2026. Free gives a light agent quota with limited models; Pro ($20) adds frontier models from OpenAI, Claude, Gemini and SpaceXAI, free use of its SWE-2 model, Devin Cloud agents and extra usage at API pricing; Max is $200 (Devin pricing). Quotas refresh daily and weekly. It's the only tool here whose docs import Cursor's editor settings, and the Devin CLI reads .cursor/rules and .cursor/mcp.json on its own (configuration import).

devin.ai/pricing

Kiro. An IDE, CLI and web agent built around specs: requirements, a technical design and an implementation plan before any code. Free gives 50 credits a month with Claude Sonnet 4.5 and open-weight models; Pro is $20 for 1,000 credits, Pro+ $40, Pro Max $100 and Power $200, with extra credits at $0.04 each (Kiro pricing). Paid plans add premium models, including Claude Sonnet 5 and Claude Opus 5. Its onboarding imports settings and extensions from VS Code, not Cursor.

kiro.dev/pricing

If you'd rather work in VS Code, JetBrains or Zed

All three keep you in an editor you may already know, and each has a $10 plan, $20 less than Cursor Premium.

GitHub Copilot in VS Code. Free gives 2,000 completions a month; Pro costs $10 with $15 of monthly AI credits; Pro+ is $39 and Max $100 (Copilot plans). It also runs in JetBrains, Visual Studio, Xcode, Neovim, Eclipse and Zed, and as Copilot CLI. VS Code reads AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md but not Cursor rules, and it can reuse Cursor's MCP config once you turn on chat.mcp.discovery.enabled (MCP reference).

github.com/features/copilot/plans

JetBrains AI and Junie. AI Free gives unlimited completion in JetBrains IDEs and 3 AI credits a month, and every JetBrains account gets Junie Lite, a free tier that runs Qwen 3.6 27B today. AI Pro costs US$10 a month or US$100 a year for 10 credits, with Junie, Claude Agent, Codex and Gemini; AI Ultimate is US$30 a month or US$300 a year for 35 credits (JetBrains AI plans). JetBrains says the final price shows at checkout. Junie CLI offers to import other agents' instruction files and detects .cursor/skills folders.

Zed. An open source editor of its own, with a smaller extension catalog than VS Code. Personal is $0 with your own API keys or external agents such as Claude Agent and Codex; Pro is $10 a month with $5 of tokens and usage beyond that at API list price plus 10%; Business is $30 a seat (Zed pricing). Its importer copies key VS Code settings but no extensions or keybindings.

zed.dev/pricing

If you want a terminal agent instead of an editor

A terminal agent edits files, runs commands and checks its own work while you describe the result, and you can keep any editor next to it, Cursor included.

• Claude Code. Comes with any paid Claude plan: Pro is $20 a month, or $17 billed yearly, and Max starts at $100 (Claude pricing). It runs in the terminal, in VS Code and JetBrains, in a desktop app and on the web, and its VS Code extension has an install link for Cursor. Its /init command reads .cursor/rules and .cursorrules into the CLAUDE.md it writes. Every Claude plan is compared in our Claude Code pricing guide.
• OpenAI Codex. Included in ChatGPT: Free and Go ($8) get the Codex desktop app with GPT-6 Luna, subject to rollout; Plus ($20) adds the CLI, IDE extension, web, iOS and GPT-6.1 Sol; Pro costs $100, $200 or $500 (Codex pricing). If you used OpenAI's models in Cursor, this is OpenAI's own agent for them, and it also runs local models through Ollama or LM Studio.

Codex has the most complete Cursor import of the 12. In the ChatGPT desktop app (Settings > Import) or the CLI (/import), it brings over Cursor's instruction files as AGENTS.md, plus settings, skills, plugins, MCP servers and recent chats; the CLI takes up to 50 chats from the last 30 days (Import from another agent).

# in your project folder
$ codex
# then type /import, choose Cursor and pick what to bring over
$ 

Open source Cursor alternatives

Four free tools put the code in your hands and let you pick any model, local ones included; you pay the model provider per token, or use free models.

Sources: Cline pricing, ClinePass, Kilo pricing, OpenCode Go and Aider, all read October 27, 2026. For local models, Kilo Code names Ollama and LM Studio, and OpenCode lists local models among its providers.

Free Cursor alternatives and their limits

Every $0 option caps the amount, the models or the editor, so pick the limit you can live with.

Read on each vendor's pages on October 27, 2026 (Antigravity models, Antigravity plans). Google AI Pro ($19.99 a month in the US) adds Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 to Antigravity, on paid plans only, not trials.

What carries over from Cursor, tool by tool

Your rules carry over best as an AGENTS.md file; your MCP servers and editor settings depend on the tool. This is what each tool's own docs said on October 27, 2026.

Yes: read or imported with no manual step. Partial: a manual step, a one-time import, or only part of the product (the Devin CLI reads Cursor rules, Devin Desktop's rules docs don't list them; Zed and Cline list the old .cursorrules file, not the .cursor/rules folder; Claude Code converts them once with /init). No: not in the docs, or a different format you re-enter by hand.

Move your rules into AGENTS.md first

Cursor's rules docs call AGENTS.md a "simple alternative to .cursor/rules", and every tool above except Aider loads it automatically; Aider loads it with --read. Cursor's .mdc rule files start with frontmatter (alwaysApply, globs, description) that other tools don't use, so strip it while you merge. On Mac or Linux, in your project folder:

# merge every Cursor rule into one AGENTS.md, without the --- frontmatter
$ find .cursor/rules -name '*.mdc' | sort | while read -r f; do echo "## From $f"; awk 'NR==1 && /^---$/ {fm=1; next} fm && /^---$/ {fm=0; next} !fm' "$f"; echo; done >> AGENTS.md
# add the old single-file rules too, if you still have one
$ [ -f .cursorrules ] && cat .cursorrules >> AGENTS.md
$ 

On Windows, in PowerShell:

PS> Get-ChildItem .cursor\rules -Recurse -Filter *.mdc | Sort-Object FullName | ForEach-Object { "## From $($_.Name)"; (Get-Content $_.FullName -Raw) -replace '(?s)\A---.*?\r?\n---\r?\n', '' } | Add-Content AGENTS.md
PS> 

A rule that only applied to some files (a globs line) now applies everywhere, so add a sentence naming the folder it's for. Our CLAUDE.md file guide shows what a good instructions file looks like, and the same advice fits AGENTS.md.

Bring your MCP servers

Cursor keeps MCP servers (Model Context Protocol, the standard way to plug tools such as a database or your email into an agent) in ~/.cursor/mcp.json and in each project's .cursor/mcp.json.

• Imported for you: Codex's import, the Devin CLI, and VS Code once discovery is on.
• Paste the entries: Antigravity, Devin Desktop, Kiro, Junie and Cline use the same mcpServers map, and Antigravity and Devin also accept Cursor's url key for remote servers; Claude Code takes one entry at a time through claude mcp add-json.
• Re-enter by hand: Zed (context_servers in its settings), Kilo Code (the mcp key in kilo.jsonc) and OpenCode V2 (mcp.servers in opencode.jsonc). Aider's docs and release notes don't mention MCP.

Keep Cursor's editor, change the agent

You don't have to leave the editor to leave Cursor's plans. Claude Code's VS Code extension installs in Cursor, Codex's IDE extension lists Cursor next to VS Code and Windsurf (Codex IDE docs), and both bill your own Claude or ChatGPT plan. Extensions are the one thing to check by name if you move to VS Code: Cursor's help page says it installs from Open VSX and swaps some Microsoft Marketplace extensions for its own builds.

Our interest: we teach Claude Code

ai school teaches Claude Code, and I build client projects with it, so weigh this page with that in mind. Claude Code is one of the 12, it isn't ranked, and our Claude Code course is in early access (pre-order). If you want to stay in an editor, Copilot, Zed or Devin Desktop fits better; if you want $0, Antigravity or an open source tool does. People leaving Claude Code rather than Cursor have their own guide, Claude Code alternatives, and the benchmark roundup is best AI coding agents.

What to do next

Find your reason in the at-a-glance table and pick one tool from that row, not three. Merge your rules into AGENTS.md with the command above, bring your MCP servers across, and give the new tool one small real task on a copy of your project before you cancel Cursor. If a terminal agent is the row you picked, our Claude Code course covers setting Claude Code up with a CLAUDE.md file, skills and MCP, the same setup this page moves between tools.