Cursor: the agent IDE, CLI and Cloud Agents, with skills, rules and plugins

Cursor comes in three parts. The desktop IDE was rebuilt around agents in the Cursor 3 interface, released on April 2, 2026, which runs many agents in parallel across repos and environments. The terminal CLI answers to the command agent. Cloud Agents run in isolated VMs with full development environments, and you can start one from the desktop app, the web, the iOS app, Slack, GitHub, Linear or the API. The newest changelog entry, Cursor Projects on September 10, 2026, adds coordinator agents that delegate work to subagents.

#How much does Cursor cost?

Hobby is free. Pro is $20 a month, Pro+ is $60 and Ultra is $200, with 20% off yearly billing. Teams seats are $40 per user a month for Standard and $120 for Premium, which carries five times a Standard seat's usage. India has its own Start plan at ₹649 a month, tax inclusive. Plans draw on two usage pools that reset monthly. The first, Cursor models, is a billing label and not a claim of authorship: it holds Composer 2.5 plus Grok 4.6 and Grok 4.5, which the docs write as Cursor Grok 4.6 and describe as jointly trained by Cursor and SpaceXAI. The second, Other models, covers third-party models at the model's API price, and on team plans Cursor adds a Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million input, output and cached tokens, from which its first-party Grok and Composer models are exempt. Cursor does not publish how much usage a plan includes. Cloud Agents are charged at API pricing for the model you select.

#How do you customise Cursor?

Skills are SKILL.md folders in .agents/skills or .cursor/skills, and the name in the frontmatter must match the folder name. Cursor also loads them from .claude/skills and .codex/skills for compatibility; see Agent Skills. Rules are .mdc files in .cursor/rules, and a plain .md file there is ignored because it has no frontmatter to carry description, globs and alwaysApply; an AGENTS.md in the project root works too. Subagents come from .cursor/agents and also from .claude/agents, with .cursor winning a name clash. Hooks live in a hooks.json; team and enterprise-managed hooks are an Enterprise feature. MCP servers go in .cursor/mcp.json. A Cursor plugin needs only a name in .cursor-plugin/plugin.json, or you can ship an Agent Plugins manifest as a plugin.json at the repository root.

#How does Cursor compare with Claude Code and Codex?

Cursor reads the SKILL.md folders the other two use, so a skill usually travels toward Cursor rather than between all three. Claude Code documents only .claude/skills locations, and Codex reads .agents/skills, so neither of them picks up .cursor/skills. For a longer comparison, see Claude Code vs Cursor vs Copilot.