What Cursor is and who makes it
Cursor is an AI-first code editor built by Anysphere, a small American company that started shipping it in 2023. It is a fork of Visual Studio Code, which is the single most important fact about it: your extensions, your keybindings, your themes and your settings mostly carry across, so switching costs an afternoon rather than a fortnight.
What Anysphere added on top is the reason people pay. Cursor holds your whole project in view rather than one open file. It indexes your repository, lets you point the AI at specific files and folders, and its agent can plan a change, edit a dozen files, run terminal commands and hand you a reviewable diff. Where GitHub Copilot feels like a very good assistant sitting beside you, Cursor feels like an editor that has been rebuilt on the assumption that AI does a meaningful share of the typing.
Like Copilot, Cursor is not tied to one model. It routes to models from several labs and lets you choose per request on the paid plan, which means the tool improves whenever any of those labs ships something better.
Key features in depth
Tab completion. Cursor's inline suggestions are trained on edit sequences rather than only on code, so instead of just finishing the line, it predicts your next edit and where it will be. Rename something in one place and Cursor offers to follow the change through the file, jumping your cursor to each spot. Developers who have used both usually rate this as noticeably better than plain completion.
Composer and agent mode. Describe a change in plain English - add a coupon field to the checkout flow, wire it to the API, update the tests - and the agent works out which files to touch, makes the edits, and can run commands to check its work. You get a diff per file and accept or reject each one. This is Cursor's headline capability and the reason people move over from a plugin.
Codebase context. Type an @ symbol and you can attach specific files, folders, documentation, a git commit or the whole codebase to your request. This sounds small and is not. Most bad AI code comes from missing context, and Cursor gives you a precise way to supply it.
Inline edit. Select a block of code, press the edit shortcut, describe what you want, and the change appears as a diff in place. For everyday work - tighten this loop, add error handling, convert this to TypeScript - it is faster than a chat conversation.
Rules files. You can commit a rules file to your repository describing conventions the AI must follow: use this state library, never write raw SQL, keep components under a certain size. Everyone on the team gets the same behaviour, which is what makes Cursor viable for a team rather than an individual.
Privacy mode. A setting that stops your code being stored on Cursor's servers beyond what a request needs. Worth turning on before you open client work, and worth telling your clients about when they ask.
Pricing tiers explained for Indian users
Cursor keeps its consumer pricing simple. Figures below convert at roughly Rs 85 to the dollar and are indicative, because the vendor bills in dollars and the exchange rate moves. Expect 18 per cent GST on top, as most foreign software vendors now collect it from Indian consumers.
| Plan | Monthly price | Indicative Rs per month | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | Free | 0 | A limited monthly allowance of agent requests and completions |
| Pro | 20 USD | About Rs 1,700 before GST | Extended agent usage, model choice, larger context |
The Hobby tier is a real free tier and includes a short Pro trial when you first sign up. Its purpose is to let you judge whether the agent is any good on your own code. It is not enough for daily professional work; you will exhaust the allowance in a few sessions of serious use.
Pro at roughly Rs 1,700 a month is the tier almost every working developer ends up on. It is twice the price of Copilot Pro, which is a real consideration in India, and the honest test is whether agent mode saves you more than an hour a month. For most professional developers it clears that bar easily. There are higher business and enterprise tiers with team management, centralised billing and admin controls, priced per seat.
Payment reality in India. Cursor charges international cards. UPI is not accepted, and many Indian debit cards are blocked for international transactions unless you enable them in your bank app. RBI e-mandate rules also cause recurring charges on Indian cards to fail more often than people expect, so a credit card with international usage switched on is the least painful route. If a monthly charge fails and the subscription lapses mid-sprint, that is a genuine annoyance, so check the card before you rely on it.
How it compares to Copilot and VS Code alternatives
| Cursor | GitHub Copilot | Windsurf or VS Code with Copilot | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you install | A new editor, forked from VS Code | A plugin in your existing editor | Either a new editor or the plugin route |
| Price | Free Hobby, then about Rs 1,700 | Free tier, then about Rs 850 | Similar band, varies by plan |
| Multi-file changes | Strongest of the three | Improving but behind | Windsurf is close, plugin route is behind |
| Adoption friction | Low if you use VS Code, higher on JetBrains | Lowest, nothing changes | Low to medium |
| Team controls | Business tier available | Strong, ties into GitHub org policy | Varies |
| If you also want PR review | Not its focus | Built in on github.com | Not its focus |
The cleanest way to think about it: if the hard part of your job is writing lots of code across a project, Cursor wins. If the hard part is fitting AI into a team that already runs on GitHub without disrupting anything, Copilot wins. Windsurf sits close to Cursor in capability and is worth trying if you want a second opinion before committing. JetBrains users face a real decision, because Cursor is a VS Code fork and moving from IntelliJ or PyCharm means giving up tooling that Cursor does not replace.
Real workflows it fits
A Bengaluru startup rebuilding its frontend. Migrating a large React codebase from one state library to another is exactly the shape of problem Cursor handles well: repetitive, spread across many files, mechanically clear but tedious. The team writes a rules file, runs the agent folder by folder, and reviews every diff. What was three weeks becomes a few days of supervised work.
A freelance developer on Upwork. Fixed-price contracts reward speed. Cursor's agent scaffolds the predictable eighty per cent - routes, forms, validation, tests - leaving attention for the parts the client will actually judge. At about Rs 1,700 a month against typical Upwork rates, one saved afternoon covers several months.
A Pune services company modernising client systems. Cursor is useful here, but the caution is stronger. Client code under an NDA means privacy mode on, and written client agreement before any AI tool sees the repository. Some enterprise clients simply forbid it, and that has to be checked at the contract stage, not after.
A two-person ed-tech startup in Chennai. Neither founder is a specialist backend engineer. Cursor lets them ship a working API, and its explanations teach them enough to maintain it. The risk is shipping code nobody on the team truly understands, which is fine until the first production incident. Reading the diffs properly is the discipline that makes this work.
A data engineer at a Mumbai fintech. Writing transformation pipelines and tests, where Cursor's ability to see related files at once genuinely helps. But anything touching payment rails or KYC data gets written by hand and reviewed twice, because a plausible wrong answer there is expensive.
Limitations to know
The biggest limitation is the one that sounds like a feature: the agent is good enough that it is tempting to stop reading its output. Cursor makes it easy to accept a fifteen-file change in a few clicks. Do that a few times and you have a codebase nobody understands. Review discipline matters more with Cursor than with any tool that only suggests one line at a time.
It is a VS Code fork, so JetBrains users must switch editors to use it properly. For a Java or Kotlin team deeply invested in IntelliJ, that is often a dealbreaker.
On very large repositories, indexing takes time and context can still be missed. The @ mentions exist precisely because automatic context selection is imperfect.
Pricing is a genuine India consideration. At roughly Rs 1,700 a month before GST, Cursor Pro is twice Copilot Pro and there is no rupee pricing, no UPI, no student plan of the kind GitHub offers, and no India-specific discount. For a student or a junior developer on an early-career salary, that is a real amount of money each month.
The interface is English only. Cursor handles prompts written in Hinglish or Hindi tolerably because the underlying models are multilingual, but it is not built for that and clear English gets better code. It also knows little about Indian-specific systems - UPI intent flows, GST return schemas, NPCI documentation, Aadhaar integrations - so treat anything it writes in that area as a starting point to verify against official documentation, never as authoritative.
Finally, this is a small company shipping fast. Features change, occasionally break, and pricing has been revised more than once. That is the trade for the pace of improvement.
How to get started
- Download Cursor from its official site and install it. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
- On first launch, accept the offer to import your VS Code settings, extensions and keybindings. This is the step that makes switching painless.
- Turn on privacy mode in settings before you open any client or employer code.
- Open a real project. Press the inline edit shortcut on a function you already understand and ask for a small change, so you can judge the quality against something you can check.
- Try @ mentions. Attach two or three related files to a chat request and notice how much better the answer is than without them.
- Use the free Pro trial on one meaningful task - a feature you were going to build anyway. That is the only honest test.
- Add a rules file to your repository listing your conventions. Commit it so teammates get the same behaviour.
- Before subscribing at about Rs 1,700 a month, enable international transactions on your card in your bank app, and prefer a credit card so the recurring charge does not silently fail.