Comparison
Relay vs Cursor
Cursor is where you write code; Relay is what runs while you are not writing any. They compose more naturally than they compete — and a team can sensibly pay for both.
Facts checked against official docs on 2026-09-08
What Cursor is
Cursor, by Anysphere, is a commercial AI coding product: a desktop editor whose homepage calls it "your coding agent for building ambitious software", plus a headless CLI and hosted cloud agents. It uses the Open VSX extension registry and offers a one-click import of VS Code extensions, themes and keybindings. Cloud agents run in isolated VMs, clone from GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps or Bitbucket, and hand work back as merge-ready pull requests; self-hosted machines can move that tool execution into a customer’s own network. Cursor ships its own model, Composer 2.5, and Bugbot reviews pull requests.
Pricing: Hobby free, no credit card, "limited Agent requests" · Pro $20/mo · Pro Plus $60/mo · Ultra $200/mo · Teams $40/user/mo monthly or $32 annual, Premium $120/user/mo monthly or $96 annual · Enterprise custom. Every plan bundles model usage with on-demand overage billed in arrears; Cursor’s own guidance says daily agent users typically incur $60–$100/mo of usage and power users $200+. As of 2026-09-08.
Side by side
| Cursor | Relay | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An editor first, with a headless CLI (`-p/--print`, json and stream-json output, session resume) and cloud agents alongside it. | A terminal harness only. No editor, no completion UI, and no plan to build one. |
| Bring your own key | Yes, for five providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure OpenAI and AWS Bedrock. Keys are sent to Cursor’s backend with every request because all requests route through Cursor’s servers for final prompt building, and on Teams and Enterprise a $0.25 per million token Cursor Token Rate applies on top of model API pricing. | Yes, with no vendor in the request path. Your machine calls your provider directly. |
| Where the agent loop runs | Cursor’s. Even with self-hosted machines, "Cursor runs the agent loop, inference, and planning" while the worker handles editing, commands and code access. | On your machine, in a process you can inspect and kill. |
| Unattended long runs | Long-running agents launched as a research preview on 2026-02-12 for Ultra, Teams and Enterprise; cloud agents subscribe to the PRs they create and drive them to completion, fixing CI and addressing bot comments. | `--autonomous` with declared budgets and completion gates that are your own shell commands. |
| Free tier | Hobby, with limited agent requests; no published request count. | $0 forever for a local developer, with no usage limit imposed by Relay — your provider bills your tokens. |
| Compliance posture | AIUC-1, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO/IEC 42001:2023 and a SOC 2 Type II attestation. | None published. If a certification is on your procurement checklist, this row is a reason to pick Cursor. |
Where Cursor is the better tool
- Tab completion and hunk-level diff review — the most-used thing in the product, used every minute, with no Relay equivalent at all.
- It is the editor. Most teams will not leave VS Code or JetBrains, and asking them to is a bigger change than adopting a harness.
- Cloud agents keep working when the laptop is shut. Relay’s local-only architecture will not, deliberately.
- Compliance and procurement: three certifications and an attestation, against Relay’s none.
- Bugbot reviews the pull request. Relay does not read your diff and form an opinion about it.
- One bill that includes inference, which is genuinely simpler than holding and rotating a provider key.
The honest take
The tempting line here — "Cursor is the GUI, Relay is the terminal" — is false, and Anysphere would say so loudly. Cursor ships a headless CLI installed by one-line curl, with print mode, json output and session resume; it is not a GUI-only product. The honest difference is narrower: everything Cursor does routes through Cursor’s servers, including requests made with your own API key, and on business plans that routing carries a per-token rate on top of your provider bill. That is a reasonable trade for prompt assembly, routing and retries, and for many teams it is the right one. It is a bad trade if provider portability is a strategy rather than a preference, or if prompts and code must not transit a third party at all. On cost, be careful in both directions: $15 a seat plus your own API bill is not obviously cheaper than $32 a seat all-in, and any comparison that quotes the first number without the second is selling rather than informing.
Sources
- https://cursor.com/pricing
- https://cursor.com/docs/account/pricing
- https://cursor.com/docs/cli/overview
- https://cursor.com/docs/settings/api-keys
- https://cursor.com/docs/cloud-agent/self-hosted
- https://cursor.com/security
Run the harness yourself — one command, your own model key, no account: curl -fsSL https://relayevals.com/harness/install.sh | bash. Quickstart · What is a coding agent harness? · Pricing