Free tier you can plan aroundEditorial callThis is a call about what each vendor publishes, not about which free tier is larger. We cannot say which grants more, because one of the two never says. A number you can check against your own week is worth more than a larger allowance nobody printed.
The word Limited, with no digit beside it
Two counted allowancesOur pick on this row
How much of your setup it asks you to changeEditorial callA read of what each product is rather than of how well either works. Copilot asks less because it adds to an existing editor. Cursor asks more because the editor is the product, and for some teams that is the reason to pick it rather than a cost.
A different editor
An extension in the one you haveOur pick on this row
Rows marked Editorial call are our judgment, not a published fact. Every other row carries two sourced values, listed in full below.
Choose Cursor if
You are willing to change editors, and you expect heavy use. Cursor states what each plan includes as a dollar budget for third-party model usage rather than as a request count, which makes a busy month easier to predict than a quota you cannot convert.
Choose GitHub Copilot if
You want to keep the editor and the keybindings you already have, and you want to know what the free tier gets you before you install anything. Copilot is the only one of these two that answers that second question with numbers.
Both put a model inside the place you already write code. The difference that decides it is not the model, because both let you point at several. It is how much of your existing setup you are willing to hand over, and what each one tells you before you pay.
The two rows marked with a source carry published figures and name the document each came from, so you can check both in about a minute. The rows marked Editorial call are our judgment, and each one says what the judgment is a read of. We have not run the same task through both tools and scored the output, so nothing here is a quality comparison.
Both tools have one, and only one of them is countable. GitHub publishes two numbers for Copilot Free and scopes the second itself, counting chat requests including Copilot Edits. Anysphere's Hobby card says Limited, applied to Agent requests, with no digit beside it on the pricing page or in the help doc.
That is a difference in what is published, and it is worth keeping apart from a difference in what is granted. Cursor's free tier may well be the more generous of the two. We cannot tell you, and neither can anyone who has only read the page.
Neither tool's overage behavior is in the table, and it is the thing most likely to decide the second month rather than the first. Cursor's plan table carries a column for how much third-party model usage each plan includes, stated in dollars. GitHub prices its credits individually and lets an account set a budget. Both are real answers to the same question and they are denominated differently, so we have left them on the profiles rather than putting two numbers side by side that do not convert.
The entry prices in the table are the individual plans. GitHub also prints per seat figures for organizations, and its documentation says the individual price is free for some users, naming verified students, verified teachers and maintainers of popular open source projects. If you are one of those, the row above is not what you would pay.
Both profiles carry the same figures with the same dates: Cursor and GitHub Copilot, and AI Coding is the category hub.
Where these numbers came from
Every figure above is the vendor's own published number. Each row names the document it was read from and the day a human opened it.
Source ledger: every claim on this page with its document and the date it was checked