The key difference
Cursor and Kiro are both AI-first IDEs built on VS Code’s open-source base. Install either and your editor feels familiar. They differ in two ways that matter more than the interface.
1. What your plan pays for.
- Cursor (pricing) now sells through The X Subscription. Its included usage covers Cursor’s own models: Grok 4.7, 4.6 and 4.5, and Composer 2.5. Claude, GPT and Gemini are available on Premium ($30) and up, billed separately at API list price.
- Kiro (pricing) sells credits. Every paid plan can spend them on Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5, GPT-5.6 and open-weight models, each at its own rate. Claude Opus 5.5 uses 2.0x credits and Sonnet 5.5 uses 1.3x, per Kiro’s models page.
2. How the agent works with you.
- Cursor is built for interactive work: you edit, the agent edits, and you steer as you go. It has a planning step, a CLI, and cloud agents on Premium and up.
- Kiro is built around specs. For a feature it first writes
requirements.md,design.mdand a task list into your repository, then executes the tasks. Steering files in.kiro/steering/and hooks in.kiro/hooks/keep the agent on your project’s rules.
Pricing in practice
| Plan | Cursor | Kiro |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Limited agent and chat requests | 50 credits/month; open-weight models and Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| $8 | Plus: Cursor’s own models only ($80/year) | — |
| $20 | — | Pro: 1,000 credits; Claude, GPT and open-weight models |
| $30 | Premium: 4x Plus usage; Claude, GPT and Gemini at API list price ($300/year) | — |
| $40 | — | Pro+: 2,000 credits |
| $100 | Super: 15x Plus usage | Pro Max: 5,000 credits |
| $200 | Ultra: 50x Plus usage | Power: 10,000 credits |
| Going over | Top up prepaid credit (third-party models) | Add-on credits at $0.04 each |
| Teams | $30, $100 or $200 per seat | Paid plans per user for teams of 2–500 |
Prices are from the official Cursor and Kiro pricing pages, checked October 22, 2026.
Rule of thumb:
- If Grok and Composer do the job, Cursor Plus at $8 is the cheapest plan here.
- If you want Claude or GPT without paying API prices on top of a subscription, Kiro Pro at $20 includes them in its credits.
Features side by side
| Cursor | Kiro | |
|---|---|---|
| Base | Fork of VS Code | Code OSS; supports Open VSX extensions, themes and VS Code settings |
| Default workflow | Interactive editing with an agent | Spec-first: requirements, design, tasks |
| Included models | Grok 4.7, 4.6, 4.5; Composer 2.5 | Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, GPT-5.6, open-weight models, Auto |
| Beyond the editor | CLI, cloud agents (Premium+), AI code review with Bugbot (Premium+) | Kiro CLI, Kiro Web cloud sandboxes, mobile app in preview |
| Project rules | Rules, hooks, skills, subagents, plugins | Steering files, hooks, Agent Skills, custom agents, Powers |
| Other IDEs | JetBrains through ACP, Xcode through Xcode’s MCP bridge (paid plans) | JetBrains and Zed through ACP |
| Own API key | Not on Plus; on higher plans, routed through Cursor | No |
| Owner | SpaceX (since August 2026) | Amazon Web Services |
Who should pick which
Choose Cursor if:
- you want the cheapest paid AI editor and Grok or Composer is good enough for most work
- you prefer steering the agent interactively, line by line
- you want Bugbot for AI code review on your pull requests
Choose Kiro if:
- you want Claude and GPT models included in your plan
- you like the agent to produce a spec you can review before it writes code
- you’re an AWS customer, or you want a free plan that includes a Claude model
Hands-on test
We haven’t run a hands-on test of this pair yet. This comparison is based on each vendor’s documentation and pricing pages, linked on the Cursor and Kiro pages. When we add a test, this page will name the task, the tool and model versions, and the date it was run.
