I've been using cursor for all my projects and while it's been mostly great experience, I sometimes wonder if Claude Code would be more reliable - or is it basically the same and it's just about how you use them?

Any opinions from someone who have 100+ hours with both?

Is it better to get Clause Pro membership or Cursor Pro membership if the goal is to utilise Claude 3.7 for coding? Use case is working on coding projects.

Both cost the same ($20).

P.S: Already have a GPT Plus subscription.

I’ve tried both a fair amount and I’m struggling to understand what I’m missing when I read all of the posts evangelizing Claude Code and trashing Cursor.

My take is that in terms of code editing they are both largely similar (comparing vs. Cursor using sonnet-4 for fairness). I’ve tried them on projects big and small, tasks complex and simple - I’ve found their specific approaches to codebase exploration and prompting to result in negligible difference when it comes to model reasoning. At the end of the day they are constrained by the LLM’s they use. When using opus output is maybe a bit better. As a side note, cursor’s vector stores provide slightly more accessible context for the models when exploring codebases, in particular large ones.

Where cursor shines is workflow friction: there is very little.

• The changes I see I can edit and iterate on directly without losing context

• I can accept granular updates in a set of changes proposed by the LLM

• Checkpoints are extremely useful and allow me to iterate effectively. Switching models halfway through a conversation has come in clutch a few times

• Cursor’s inline generation for small edits and terminal commands is a big time saver

• Being able to instantly review changes like a PR is very nice

• Cursor having access to extra IDE context (e.g linting) makes for shorter model iteration times

The fact that Cursor allows you to use different models seamlessly is the biggest one for me - there are some things I’ve found other models do better than Claude, in particular O3 shines when it comes to algorithms and complexity without tripping over existing logic. Claude is a bit better at writing code that is just “works” when utilizing 3rd party API’s and newer languages features. Combing the strengths of different models is the way to go imo

There are some other things that I may be missing and I’m intentionally leaving out my UI preference as that is subjective. I’m an swe with 10y+ experience (although I doubt that means much as I’m a pretty mediocre one) and I really struggle to see how Claude’s code generation abilities are better to the point that they negate all of the above. That being said I’m open to having my mind changed - in what ways is Claude code objectively better than Cursor?

Hi all,

Curious how you guys think about Claude Pro + Cursor versus Claude Code (included in Claude Max). I'm currently working on a new software project, using Claude Pro and Visual Studio Code (+ GitHub Copilot). Curious about your insights!