Agentic Index
Cognition vs Cursor (2026)
Cognition last verified ·Cursor last verified
Cognition's Devin is the engineer you hand a whole task to, and Cursor is the editor where you write code with agents beside you. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Devin plans, codes and tests in its own browser, keeps a living wiki of each repository and learns how each developer likes to work. It starts on a free plan, with Pro at $20 a month. Cursor rebuilds VS Code around AI, with Tab predictive editing and an Agents Window for background and cloud agents. Since October 2026 it has been sold within The X Subscription, from Plus at $8 a month on Grok models only, up to Premium at $30, with Claude, GPT and Gemini at API list price. Choose Cognition to delegate whole pieces of work and review what comes back. Choose Cursor to keep developers in the editor and make their own work faster.
On the Agentic Index coding agent ranking, neither Cognition nor Cursor clears the bar, which asks for all five merge loop capabilities documented in full. Cognition does not document testing, debugging and optimization in full; Cursor does not document knowledge grounding and RAG in full, nor testing, debugging and optimization. 3 of the 96 vendors in the lane clear it. See the coding agent ranking
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Cognition and Cursor are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 1,084 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
This comparison, as a video
Cognition vs Cursor in 4 minutes
A short walkthrough of what each product does, how they are priced, where they overlap and when to choose each.
Choose Cognition if
- You want to delegate whole tasks and get back a tested pull request, rather than speed up your own typing.
- Devin should keep a living wiki of every repository and remember each developer's preferences across sessions.
- One Agent Command Center in Devin Desktop should track your local and cloud agents together.
Choose Cursor if
- Your developers want a better editor, with Tab predictive editing and inline changes under their own hands.
- You want fleets of background and cloud agents run from one Agents Window and started by automations on pull requests, Slack messages or incidents.
- You want to start at $8 a month on Cursor's own Grok models and pay API list price only when you reach for Claude, GPT or Gemini.
| Feature | C Cognition |
C Cursor |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
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Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
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CognitionIntegrations & Tool Calling Native integrations cover GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Linear, PagerDuty and Pylon, and MCP connects Devin to hundreds of external tools and data sources, including monitoring, databases and documentation systems. Sourcedocs.devin.ai/integrations/overviewread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorIntegrations & Tool Calling MCP servers connect the agent to external tools and data over stdio, SSE or Streamable HTTP with OAuth for remote servers, installed one click from the Cursor Marketplace or configured in mcp.json, and team admins can distribute servers through a team marketplace; tools, prompts, resources and elicitation are supported. Sourcecursor.com/docs/mcpread 2026-09-29 |
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Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
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CognitionWorkflow Orchestration Dynamic workflows are Python scripts Devin writes and runs to orchestrate a team of Devin agents, deciding which agents run in what order, fanning items through stages in parallel on separate VMs and passing structured results from one stage to the next. Devin also delegates large tasks to managed Devins, each in its own VM. Sourcedocs.devin.ai/work-with-devin/dynamic-workflows and advanced-capabilitiesread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorWorkflow Orchestration The agent delegates to subagents that each run in their own context window, in the foreground or in the background and in parallel, with built in Explore, Bash and Browser subagents and custom subagents defined with their own prompts, tool access and models, in the editor, the CLI and Cloud Agents. Sourcecursor.com/docs/subagentsread 2026-09-29 |
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Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
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CognitionTriggers & Channel Coverage Automations fire on Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Linear, Jira, Pylon, PagerDuty, schedule and webhook events, so once a trigger is defined Devin handles each event as it arrives without anyone tagging it. Scheduled sessions add recurring work, and Devin Oncall picks up alerts, bugs and incidents to investigate, fix or mitigate. Sourcedocs.devin.ai/product-guides/automations and devin-oncallread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorTriggers & Channel Coverage Automations run cloud agents in the background on a schedule (preset or cron) or in response to events, a GitHub pull request opened or marked ready, Slack messages, Linear issue changes, PagerDuty incidents, Sentry errors and webhooks, with no person starting the run; Bugbot also reviews every pull request update automatically. Sourcecursor.com/docs/cloud-agent/automations and docs/bugbotread 2026-09-29 |
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| Knowledge & context | ||
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Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
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CognitionKnowledge Grounding & RAG Connected repositories are indexed from the DeepWiki settings page into wikis with architecture diagrams, source links and summaries, kept current and searchable, and Ask Devin uses them with code search to find context in the customer's code. Sourcedocs.devin.ai/work-with-devin/deepwiki and onboard-devin/index-reporead 2026-10-28 |
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CursorKnowledge Grounding & RAG The agent finds code with Instant Grep, an exact match and regex search engine that builds and queries its index on the developer's machine, and an Explore subagent that runs parallel searches per task; files, folders and past chats are attached per conversation with @ mentions. Cursor does not store embeddings of the codebase for search, so context is gathered on each run, and the local grep index exists to speed up search. Sourcecursor.com/docs/agent/tools/search and help/customization/contextread 2026-09-29 |
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Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
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CognitionMemory & State Persistence Devin Memory saves each user's preferences, corrections, decisions and lessons about their repos as one line notes in a personal memory drive, a Git repository of Markdown files that every new session loads. Each note links back to the session that taught it. Dreaming, a background session about once a day, consolidates overlapping notes and removes stale ones no session has used. Users browse their memory under Customize and can tell Devin to forget a note or turn personal memory off, and admins set it on or off for an organization or the whole enterprise. Knowledge adds shared instructions that users approve, scoped from one repository up to the enterprise. Sourcedocs.devin.ai/product-guides/memory and knowledgeread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorMemory & State Persistence Past agent transcripts can be searched from the Agents Window and attached to a new conversation with @Chats, and checkpoints snapshot modified files within a session. Cursor does not describe a memory layer of its own, project rules act as standing instructions, and subagents start without prior conversation history. Sourcecursor.com/help/customization/context and docs/agent/overviewread 2026-09-29 |
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| Control & trust | ||
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Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
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CognitionHuman Oversight & Guardrails Local Hands lets a cloud Devin session run commands and edit files on the user's own computer only with the user's approval for each tool call. After a pull request Devin offers to test the app and waits for a click unless pre approved testing is turned on. Knowledge Devin proposes is saved only after a user edits and approves it, AI guardrails screen messages and PR comments and can block them before Devin acts, security profiles apply reusable restrictions to network, MCP and git access, and Devin Review runs only as often as the customer sets. Sourcedocs.devin.ai local-hands, testing-and-recordings, knowledge, ai-guardrails and security-profilesread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorHuman Oversight & Guardrails Run Modes decide when the agent stops for approval on shell, MCP and fetch calls: Allowlist runs only listed actions without asking, Auto-review sandboxes shell commands and sends other calls to a classifier that can ask the user to approve, plain English block instructions route named actions to approval, and a team configuration set in the dashboard overrides user and project settings; browser tools require approval by default. Sourcecursor.com/docs/agent/security/run-modes and docs/agent/tools/browserread 2026-09-29 |
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Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
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CognitionSecurity, Identity & Governance Independent auditors assess Cognition's security program at least annually under SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, and data is protected with TLS 1.2 or higher in transit and AES-256 at rest. Enterprise adds SAML and OIDC SSO, SCIM 2.0 provisioning, IdP group mapping, IP access lists and custom roles for fine grained RBAC. Sourcecognition.com/legal/security, docs.devin.ai custom-roles, scim and devin.ai/pricingread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorSecurity, Identity & Governance Cursor holds a SOC 2 Type II attestation and AIUC-1, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certifications, with certificates and reports available on request at trust.cursor.com, and offers SSO, SCIM and enforced multi factor authentication. SAML and OIDC SSO come on Teams, and SCIM, repository and model access controls and audit logs on Enterprise. Sourcecursor.com/security and cursor.com/pricingread 2026-09-29 |
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Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
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CognitionObservability & Auditability The session Progress tab unifies shell commands with outputs, code edits and browser activity, and users can jump to any point in the command history and open individual steps after the fact. Session Insights adds a timeline of key events and knowledge usage for completed sessions, guardrail events land in audit logs with a session link, and the Devin MCP server and API expose session events for search. Sourcedocs.devin.ai session tools, session insights, ai-guardrails and devin-mcpread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorObservability & Auditability Hooks fire on every step of the agent loop (preToolUse and postToolUse, shell and MCP execution before and after, file reads and edits, subagent start and stop, agent responses and thoughts), auditing is one of their named uses, and Enterprise admins distribute team hooks from the dashboard. The Admin API returns per request usage events with model, tokens and conversation ID, and its audit log covers logins and user and settings changes, with no agent actions among them. Cursor does not ship a log sink for the per step hook record, so the customer builds one to keep that record as an audit trail. Sourcecursor.com/docs/hooks and docs/account/teams/admin-apiread 2026-09-29 |
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Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
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CognitionDeployment & Data Residency Outposts, generally available on Pro, Max and Teams, run Devin sessions inside infrastructure the customer controls (its own VMs, containers, Kubernetes clusters or on premises machines), so command execution, file edits and repository access stay on customer machines while inference and planning stay in Devin's cloud. Enterprise also offers a Cognition hosted single tenant VPC reached over PrivateLink, and federal customers can run Devin Desktop and the CLI fully air gapped against their own model endpoints. Sourcedocs.devin.ai/cloud/outposts/overview, enterprise/deployment/overview and federal/air-gapped/overviewread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorDeployment & Data Residency Self-Hosted Machines move Cloud Agent tool execution to machines the customer manages, such as a Linux VM in the customer's AWS account, a Kubernetes cluster or its own devices, with the checkout, build cache and machine local credentials staying there (Team Pools on Enterprise). Cursor still runs the agent loop, inference and planning, and Enterprise customers can enroll in US only data residency. Sourcecursor.com/docs/cloud-agent/self-hosted and help/security-and-privacy/regionsread 2026-09-29 |
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| Solution readiness | ||
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Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
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CognitionPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Cognition publishes the Devin official marketplace of plugins, mostly one per integration such as Linear, Notion, Datadog or Snowflake, each bundling skills and optionally rules, hooks, MCP servers and subagents, which administrators install or require for an organization. Playbooks add reusable prompt libraries, and Skills are SKILL.md procedures committed to a repository that every session follows. Sourcedocs.devin.ai/product-guides/plugins and skillsread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Plugins bundle rules, skills, agents, commands, MCP servers and hooks, and the Cursor Marketplace lists manually reviewed official plugins installed per project or user from Customize, including Amplitude, Datadog, Figma, Linear, Sentry, Stripe, Supabase and Vercel plugins. Teams and Enterprise can run private team marketplaces, and three subagents ship built in. Sourcecursor.com/docs/plugins and cursor.com/marketplaceread 2026-09-29 |
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| Platform extensibility | ||
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Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
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CognitionModel Flexibility & Routing Users pick the model from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Cognition models, including the SWE-2 coding model, plus open models such as DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM, with a --model flag, a /model command or a config default, and Enterprise teams restrict which models are available in Team Settings. Adaptive routes each task to a model automatically, and Fusion pairs a frontier lead model with a lower cost sidekick in Devin Desktop and the CLI. Sourcedocs.devin.ai/cli/models, adaptive and fusionread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorModel Flexibility & Routing Cursor's own models, Grok and Composer, run from a weekly usage pool on every paid plan. On Premium and above, users also pick Anthropic, OpenAI and Google models at API list price from prepaid credit. On Teams and Enterprise, Cursor Router picks among Cursor and third party models by cost, balance or intelligence, and admins allow or block models. Plus is limited to Grok models. Sourcecursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing and cursor.com/pricingread 2026-10-25 |
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APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
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CognitionAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility The Devin API is documented across more than 300 reference pages, with an Outposts API and CLI reference and a CLI plugin format, giving programmatic control of sessions and the platform. The official Devin MCP server at mcp.devin.ai/mcp authenticates with a Devin API key and exposes tools that create, search and steer sessions, manage playbooks, knowledge and schedules, and list integrations. Sourcedocs.devin.ai llms.txt (API documentation) and work-with-devin/devin-mcpread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility The Cloud Agents API at api.cursor.com, with Basic or Bearer authentication on user or service account keys, creates, lists, follows up, streams, cancels, archives and deletes agents and their runs and returns artifacts, and TypeScript and Python SDKs are published beside it. Sourcecursor.com/docs/cloud-agent/api/endpointsread 2026-09-29 |
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Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
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CognitionTesting, Debugging & Optimization After a pull request, Devin can enter a testing mode that plans one end to end flow, runs it in the desktop and sends a screen recording as proof, and Devin Review checks pull requests. Session Insights reviews a completed session with feedback and an improved prompt. These check the agent's output or one session after the fact. No harness scores the agent's behavior across runs, and FrontierCode is Cognition's own published benchmark. Sourcedocs.devin.ai testing-and-recordings, session-insights and devin-reviewread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorTesting, Debugging & Optimization Bugbot reviews each pull request for bugs, security issues and quality problems and publishes a CI check status, and a custom verifier subagent can run the tests and report what passed. Both test the customer's code, and Cursor does not describe a harness, scored test set or optimization loop for evaluating the agent's own behavior. Sourcecursor.com/docs/bugbot and docs/subagentsread 2026-09-29 |
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| Specialist automation | ||
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Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
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CognitionBrowser & Computer Use Each session includes an interactive browser Devin operates for testing and visual verification alongside its shell and IDE, and a full desktop for Computer Use with screenshots and recordings. In testing mode Devin runs the app, clicks through one end to end flow in the browser and records the screen. Sourcedocs.devin.ai devin-session-tools, computer-use and testing-and-recordingsread 2026-10-28 |
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CursorBrowser & Computer Use The browser tool lets the agent control a browser pane inside Cursor, navigating, clicking, typing, scrolling and taking screenshots to test applications, audit accessibility and check visual changes, through Cursor's own MCP server, with approval required by default and an admin origin allowlist; a built in Browser subagent runs these steps, and self hosted workers run computer use tools. Sourcecursor.com/docs/agent/tools/browser and docs/subagentsread 2026-09-29 |
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Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | C Cognition |
C Cursor |
|---|---|---|
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Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Free tier, Pro at $20 a month, Max at $200 a month, Teams at $40 a month per full seat with an $80 monthly minimum, and Enterprise at custom pricing. | Free plan, Plus at $8 a month with Grok models only, Premium at $30 a month, Super at $100, Ultra at $200, Teams from $30 per user a month, and Enterprise at custom pricing. |
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Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, exact | Public, partial |
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Billing Primary billing axis |
Monthly plans with an included usage quota, plus prepaid on demand credits for usage beyond it. Teams charges $40 a month per full seat with an $80 monthly minimum, and flex seats are free. | A monthly plan with a weekly usage pool for Cursor's own models, Grok and Composer. Models from other makers are paid from prepaid credit at API list price on Premium and above. |
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Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
High variable cost | Medium variable cost |
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Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tierTrial
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Free tier
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Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Self-serve | Mixed |
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Pricing verified When this pricing was last checked |
Product updates
Newest first, each linked to its source.
Cognition
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· Agent capability
Deep scans in Devin Security now hunt for complex chained exploits across large codebases, using Claude Mythos and other frontier cyber models that enterprises reach through Devin without separate model access.
Source -
· Memory / state
Devin now remembers what it learns about each user and their work across sessions, in memory that is personal to the user and not shared with the organization.
Source -
· Integrations
Devin now works as a native agent inside Jira through the Devin for Jira app.
Source
Cursor
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· Human approval / guardrails
Cursor 3.24 makes Auto-review stop for approval before the agent runs a recursive, force, wildcard or mirror delete whose target could resolve differently than written, and commands that match a user's block instructions now always show the approval card.
Source -
· Agent capability
Cursor launched Rollouts and Security Review for Teams and Enterprise customers.
Source -
· Deployment / data residency
Cursor introduced self-hosted machines, allowing users to keep codebases, build outputs, and secrets on internal infrastructure while the agent handles tool calls locally.
Source
OpenAI has said it will end Cursor's access to its models, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026, after SpaceX acquired Anysphere, the company behind Cursor.
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