Cursor vs Copilot: a real-world benchmark
Same task, two tools, head-to-head timings and quality scores across 30 real engineering tickets.
Cursor and GitHub Copilot get compared constantly, usually with vibes. We ran them through 30 real tickets from an open-source SaaS codebase and timed every step. Here are the numbers.
The setup
Tickets ranged from one-line fixes to multi-file features. Two engineers ran the same tickets — one in Cursor with its agent enabled, one in VS Code with Copilot Chat and Copilot Workspace.
We measured: time to first working draft, number of follow-up prompts, lines of code changed vs final lines after review, and whether the PR passed CI on the first try.
Headline numbers
- Median time-to-first-draft: Cursor 4m 12s · Copilot 6m 48s.
- First-try CI pass rate: Cursor 71% · Copilot 58%.
- Average follow-up prompts per ticket: Cursor 2.3 · Copilot 3.6.
- Reviewer-requested changes per PR: Cursor 1.4 · Copilot 1.9.
Why Cursor pulled ahead
Cursor's edge wasn't model quality — both can be configured with the same frontier models. It was UX. The composer's diff preview and the agent's ability to read related files without being told meant fewer round-trips per change.
Copilot Workspace closed a lot of the gap in late 2025, but it still asks for confirmation in places Cursor just acts.
Where Copilot won
Copilot won on tickets that touched org-wide standards. The enterprise indexing and policy controls are a real advantage for teams that care about compliance and consistency more than raw speed.
It also won on cost-at-scale. Per-seat pricing is friendlier than Cursor's pro plan once you cross a few dozen seats.
Verdict
If you're a small team optimizing for shipping: Cursor.
If you're an enterprise optimizing for governance: Copilot.
If you're somewhere in the middle: run both for two weeks and look at your own CI numbers. They don't lie.