Codex vs Cursor: plans, limits and features compared

Codex vs Cursor comes down to where you want the agent to live. Cursor is an AI editor with an agent built in, sold on its own plans from $8 a month. Codex is OpenAI's coding agent inside ChatGPT, so you get it with a ChatGPT plan, and it runs in a terminal, in an editor extension, in the cloud and in the ChatGPT apps. This comparison is based on the products' docs and pricing pages as of October 29, 2026, not on our own hands-on testing.

Both can be used together. The Codex docs list Cursor as a supported editor for the Codex extension, next to VS Code, Windsurf, Xcode and JetBrains IDEs.

Codex vs Cursor at a glance

What Cursor costs

Cursor's pricing page lists a free plan with limited usage, Plus at $8 a month, Premium at $30, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200. The paid tiers include 4x, 15x and 50x the usage of Plus for Premium, Super and Ultra. Annual billing is $80 for Plus, $300 for Premium, $1,000 for Super and $2,000 for Ultra, according to Cursor's plan docs.

Plus is narrow. It covers Cursor's own models only, with no cloud agents, automations or third-party models. Premium adds cloud agents, code review and third-party models. Those models are billed at API list price from prepaid credit, for example Claude Sonnet 5.5 at $2 input and $10 output per million tokens. Allowances refresh weekly. For more, see our guide to whether Cursor is free.

What Codex costs

Codex has no separate price. Per the Codex pricing page, it comes with ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Edu and Enterprise. Plus is $20 a month and includes Codex on the web, in the CLI, in the IDE extension and on iOS. Pro starts at $100 a month, with $200 and $500 tiers. Business is $20 per user a month on annual billing.

Limits are given as estimates. On Plus and standard Business, local messages per five-hour period range from 5 to 45 on GPT-6 Astra, 15 to 160 on GPT-6.1 Sol and 350 to 3,000 on GPT-6 Luna. Cloud tasks use more allowance than local messages. Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit. The page gives no limits for Free or Go. Using Codex with an API key is billed at API prices instead. More in our piece on whether Codex is free.

How the two work day to day

Cursor's agent can search and edit files, run shell commands, control a browser and generate images, and the docs say there is no limit on tool calls in a task. It saves checkpoints before big changes. Its CLI has Agent, Plan and Ask modes and a non-interactive mode for CI.

Cursor's cloud agents run in isolated VMs and push to a separate branch. You can start them from the desktop app, the web, iOS, Slack, GitHub, Linear or an API. They need Premium or higher and a spend limit.

The Codex CLI inspects a local repository, edits files, runs tools on your machine and can review a commit or branch without touching your working tree. It runs non-interactively with codex exec for scripts and CI. It supports MCP servers, skills and plugins. The docs also list a sandbox, permission modes and a Windows sandbox, though we could not open those pages for details.

Which one fits

Pick Cursor if you want the agent inside the editor you work in all day, and you want to choose among models from several labs. Pick Codex if you already pay for ChatGPT, want a terminal-first agent, or want the same agent in the CLI, the IDE and the phone app. For a third option, see our Cursor vs Claude Code and Claude Code vs Codex comparisons.

What we could not compare

We found no independent benchmark that puts Cursor and Codex head to head. The Terminal-Bench leaderboard page showed no entries when we opened it on October 29, and results depend on which model sits behind each agent. Cursor can run OpenAI models and Codex runs only OpenAI's, so a score belongs to a model and agent pair, not to the product. Check Terminal-Bench and SWE-bench for current numbers. Prices and limits on both sides change often, and the Cursor pricing page and docs differ slightly on team tiers.