Cursor is an AI editor from Anysphere: Hobby free, Pro $20 a month, Teams Standard $40 per user, Enterprise custom. Devin is Cognition’s autonomous engineer: Free, Pro $20 a month, Max $200, Teams from an $80 monthly minimum with $40 full seats, Enterprise billed in Agent Compute Units at a contracted rate. Both now span editor, CLI, and cloud. The durable difference is the unit of work: Cursor optimizes the keystroke and the session you are present for, Devin optimizes the ticket you assign and review later. For teams with a small number of heavy users, Devin’s free flex seats make it materially cheaper per head than Cursor’s flat $40.
- The category boundary has collapsed. Devin ships an editor; Cursor ships cloud agents.
- What survives: Cursor optimizes the keystroke, Devin optimizes the ticket.
- Devin Desktop is the editor formerly called Windsurf, included from the Pro seat.
- Devin has a free tier; Cursor’s Hobby plan is free too, so both are testable at zero cost.
- Team seats differ in shape: Cursor $40 flat per user, Devin $40 full seats plus free flex seats.
- Cursor is metered by model tokens; Devin by agent work, which is attributable per task.
The difference that has not moved
Both products can now do most of what the other does, badly described. Cursor has agent mode, a CLI, background agents, and cloud runs with shared team context. Devin has a local CLI, a desktop editor, and a cloud fleet. If you compare capability lists you will conclude they are the same product, and you will buy the wrong one.
The thing to compare is what each is optimized around, because that is what you feel every day.
| Cursor | Devin | |
|---|---|---|
| Optimized around | The keystroke | The ticket |
| You are | In the loop, editing | Elsewhere, reviewing |
| The unit of work | A change you are watching | A pull request you receive |
| Best moment | You know roughly what to write | You can describe the outcome and walk away |
| Worst moment | A task too large to hold in one window | A task too vague to scope in advance |
| Failure costs | A few seconds of correction | A whole session and its review |
| Scales with | Your typing and attention | Your review capacity |
Both price ladders, side by side
| Cursor | Devin | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Anysphere | Cognition |
| Free tier | Hobby, $0 | Free, $0 |
| Individual entry | $20/mo (Pro) | $20/mo (Pro) |
| Individual top | $200/mo (Ultra) | $200/mo (Max) |
| Team entry | $40/user/mo | $80/mo minimum |
| Full team seat | $40 | $40 |
| Occasional user seat | Full price | Free flex seat, draws shared credits |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom, billed in ACUs |
| Metered on | Model tokens | Agent work, as credits or ACUs |
| Overage behavior | Continues on demand | On-demand credits, which roll over |
| Surcharge above individual | $0.25 per million tokens | None published |
Two rows deserve more than a cell. First, Devin’s free flex seats: a team can have unlimited members who draw from a shared on-demand credit pool with no fixed monthly charge, alongside $40 full seats for people who use it every day. Cursor charges $40 for everyone with a login. On a team of twenty-three where three people are heavy users, that is roughly $120 in Devin seats plus consumption against $920 in Cursor seats.
Second, the Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million tokens applies to third-party model requests on Teams and Enterprise and does not exist on individual plans. It is small per token and not small per team. The full arithmetic is in the Cursor Enterprise pricing guide.
The fact that reframes the comparison
Devin Desktop is the editor formerly called Windsurf. Cognition acquired it and folded it into the Devin product line alongside Devin Cloud, the Devin CLI, and Devin Review, all on one account and one commercial system.
This matters because it means a $20 Devin Pro seat is not only an autonomous cloud agent. It also includes the editor that was Cursor’s most direct competitor for two years. The comparison "should I buy an editor or an agent" therefore has an answer nobody wrote down: on Devin you get both from one seat, and on Cursor you get an editor whose agent features are excellent but architected around a window you sit in front of.
The corollary for Cursor is that its agent story is real and improving: agent mode, cloud agents with shared team context, background runs, and a CLI. If you are already committed to Cursor, the honest question is not whether it can run agents. It is whether one editor window is the right container for six of them at once.
A pick per scenario
Find the row that describes your week. The answer in the second column is the one to trial first, not the one to sign a year of.
| If you | Start with | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Read and edit code all day | Cursor | Tab completion is unlimited and draws from no pool |
| Work from a ticket queue | Devin | The unit of delegation matches the unit of work |
| Have a large backlog of small scoped tasks | Devin | Assignment scales past what one window can hold |
| Are exploring an unfamiliar codebase | Cursor | Being in the loop is how you learn the codebase |
| Need SSO on a small team today | Cursor | SSO ships on the $40 Teams tier, not held for Enterprise |
| Have three heavy users and twenty occasional ones | Devin | Free flex seats price the tail at zero |
| Need code to stay inside your own cloud | Devin | Enterprise offers a VPC deployment option |
| Want one integrated product, not a stack | Cursor | Editor, agent, review bot, and admin in one purchase |
| Must attribute cost to a specific task | Devin | Consumption is metered per session, not per window of time |
The cost neither vendor prices
Both tools convert writing time into reviewing time. They differ in when the bill arrives and how large each instalment is, and this is the axis that actually decides whether a rollout succeeds.
| Cursor | Devin | |
|---|---|---|
| Review happens | Continuously, as you edit | All at once, per pull request |
| A wrong turn costs | A keystroke | A session |
| Context you must hold | You were there | You must reconstruct it |
| The ceiling is | Your attention | Your review capacity |
| Overload looks like | Accepting diffs you skimmed | A queue of PRs nobody has read |
- Keep the assigned unit small enough to verify. An agent pull request nobody can review carefully is a liability that stays invisible until something breaks.
- Review deletions as hard as additions. Removed lines get less scrutiny in a diff view, and that is where regressions live.
- Commit before any unattended run. A clean tree turns an investigation into a reset.
- Write the conventions down. Both products read repository instruction files. Neither absorbs house style the way a colleague does over months.
- Measure hours spent reading, not lines produced. The first number tells you whether the tool worked. The second tells you nothing.
Running both, and the third shape
These are not substitutes and plenty of teams end up with both: an editor for the work you are thinking about, and an assignment system for the queue you are not. Both have free tiers, so testing the pairing costs nothing but attention.
What that leaves unsolved is the seam. Two vendors means two invoices, two admin surfaces, two usage dashboards, two definitions of a seat, and no single answer to what a repository cost this month. That seam is the reason a third shape exists.
For the team seat decision on the Cursor side see Cursor for teams. For Devin above the self-serve tiers see Devin enterprise pricing. For the broader field, the category decision procedure is more durable than any ranking.
Questions people ask
Is Devin better than Cursor?
They optimize different units of work. Cursor optimizes the keystroke and is the best AI editor available. Devin optimizes the ticket and is built to return a pull request from a scoped brief. The better one is whichever matches how work arrives for you.
Is Devin cheaper than Cursor?
At the individual level both are $20 a month with a free tier below it. At team level the shape differs: Cursor is $40 per user flat, while Devin has an $80 monthly minimum with $40 full seats and unlimited free flex seats that draw from shared credits. On a team with a few heavy users and a long tail, Devin is materially cheaper per head.
Does Devin have an editor now?
Yes. Devin Desktop is the editor formerly called Windsurf, which Cognition folded into the Devin product line alongside Devin Cloud, the Devin CLI, and Devin Review. A Pro seat covers the product line, not only the cloud agent.
Does Cursor have cloud agents?
Yes. Cursor ships background and cloud agents with shared team context on the Teams tiers, plus a CLI. The category boundary between the two products no longer holds on capability, only on where each places its center of gravity.
Which is better for a large team?
Cursor if you want one integrated product and SSO at $40 a seat. Devin if usage is concentrated in a few people, if work arrives as tickets, or if you need a deployment inside your own cloud, which Devin offers at Enterprise and Cursor does not.
Can I use both?
Yes, and the pairing is coherent: an editor for the work you are present for, an assignment system for the queue you are not. Both have free tiers so the trial is close to free. The cost is two invoices and two admin surfaces.
Which produces better code?
That changes with every model release and is the least durable thing to decide on. Both run frontier models; Devin also runs Cognition’s own SWE models. Decide on the delegation shape, which changes slowly, rather than on a benchmark that changes monthly.
Does Devin still bill in ACUs?
On enterprise contracts, yes: Cognition documents that Enterprise customers are billed in Agent Compute Units at the rate set in their order form. Self-serve moved to plan quota plus on-demand credits, and Cognition notes that a credit carries the same dollar value as the ACU it replaced.
Sources
Every figure above was read from these pages on August 2026. Vendors reprice without notice; if you find a stale number, tell us.
- Cursor pricing
- Devin pricing
- Devin documentation: self-serve plans Full seats, flex seats, the Teams minimum, and credit rollover.
- Devin documentation: enterprise billing Enterprise customers are billed in ACUs at the order-form rate.