GitHub Copilot vs Cursor: What They Actually Cost as Your Engineering Team Grows

The Rare Case Where We Don't Have to Guess

Most SaaS pricing gets vague once you need more than a handful of seats -- "Contact Sales" replaces a real number. GitHub Copilot and Cursor are unusual: both publish per-user pricing at every tier, including their top Business/Enterprise plans. That means we can compute exact team costs at any size instead of hitting a custom-quote wall, which is why they're worth a dedicated cost breakdown separate from our GitHub Copilot vs Cursor feature comparison.

The Published Per-Seat Rates

- **GitHub Copilot**: Individual $10/mo per user, Business $19/mo per user, Enterprise $39/mo per user.

- **Cursor**: Pro $20/mo per user (Hobby is free but capped at 2,000 completions and 50 premium requests/mo -- not practical for daily professional use), Business $40/mo per user. Cursor does not publish a tier above Business in our data.

Both companies price Copilot at almost exactly half of the equivalent Cursor tier: $10 vs $20 for the individual-style plan, $19 vs $40 for the admin-managed team plan.

Cost by Team Size: Individual/Pro Plans

These are the informal option -- no centralized admin console or SSO, just N personal subscriptions.

Cost by Team Size: Business Plans

These add admin controls, SAML SSO, and org-wide policy -- what most companies actually need to roll AI coding tools out beyond a handful of early adopters.

At 25 developers on the admin-managed tier, that's a $525/mo gap -- $6,300/year -- between the two tools. Even Copilot's Enterprise tier at 25 seats (25 x $39 = $975/mo) still undercuts Cursor Business at the same headcount.

Why This Isn't the Whole Story

Price alone doesn't tell you which tool to buy. Our feature comparison found Cursor's full-codebase awareness and multi-file Composer meaningfully faster for complex, multi-file changes, while Copilot wins on IDE flexibility (VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim) and more mature enterprise security (audit logs, IP indemnity). If Cursor's editor genuinely makes your team faster, the per-seat premium may pay for itself quickly. This page exists to answer a narrower, purely numeric question: what will each option actually cost at your headcount, so you're negotiating or budgeting from real numbers instead of a single "starting at" price.

What We Couldn't Verify

Cursor's pricing data doesn't include a published tier above Business, so we can't say whether a 100+ developer org gets a lower negotiated per-seat rate the way GitHub Copilot's Enterprise tier suggests Microsoft offers at scale. If you're scoping a very large rollout, confirm current per-seat pricing directly with each vendor -- these figures reflect the tiers published in our own tools database, not private enterprise quotes.