Why I changed Cursor to Copilot and it turned out to be the best choice

Hello everyone. I'm the creator of APM and I have been trying various AI assistant tools the last year. Id say I have a fair amount of experience when it comes to using them effectively and also when it comes to terms like prompt, context engineering etc. Ive been fairly active in the r/cursor subreddit since I discovered Cursor, about November-December 2024. At first I would just post how amazing this tool is and how I feel like I am robbing them with how efficient and effective my workflow had become. Nowadays, im not that active here since I switched to VS Code + Copilot but I have been paying attention to how many ppl have been complaining about Cursor's billing changes feel like a scam and what not. Thank God, I managed to predict this back in May when I cancelled my sub since they had the incredibly slow queues and the product was basically unusable... now I dont have to go through feeling like I am being robbed!

Seriously... thats the vibe ppl in that subreddit have been getting from using the product lately and it shows. All these subtle, sketchy moves on changing the billing, not explaining what "unlimited" means (since it wasnt actually unlimited) or what the rate limits were. I remember someone got as far as doing a research to see if they are actually breaking any laws and found two haha. Even if this company had the best product in the world and I would set my self back from not using it, I would still cancel my sub since I can't stand the feeling of being scammed.

A month ago, the main argument was that:

Cursor has the best product in the world when it comes to AI assistance so they can do whatever they want and most ppl will still stay and continue using it.

However now in my opinion, this isnt even the case. Cursor had the best product in the world, but now other labs are catching up and maybe even getting ahead. Here is a list of the top of my head of products that actually match Cursor in performance:

• Claude Code (maybe its even better in the Max Option)
• VS Code + Roo OR Cline ( and also these are OPEN SOURCE and have GREAT communities and devs behind them)
• VS Code + Copilot (my personal fav + its also OPEN SOURCE)

In general, everybody knows that supporting Open Source products is better, but many times it feels like you are compromising some of the performance you can get just to be Open Source. I'd say that rn this isnt the case. I think that Open Source is catching up and actually now that hosting local LLMs in regular GPUs is starting to become a thing... its probably gonna stay that way until some tech giant decides otherwise.

Why I prefer Copilot:

1. First of all, I have Copilot Pro on a free from Github Education. People are gonna come at me and say that Cursor is free for students too, but it's not. Its free for students that have a .edu email, meaning that its only free for students with from USA, UK, Canada and in general top-player countries. Countries like mine, you have to contact their support only for Sam the LLM to say some AI slop and just tell you to buy Pro...
2. Second of all, it operates as Cursor used to: with a standard monthly request limit. On Copilot Pro its 300 premium requests for 10 bucks. Pretty good deal for me, as ive noticed that in Copilot its ACTUALLY around 300 requests and not 150 and the rest are broken tool calls or no-answer requests.
3. Thirdly, it's actually GOOD. Since I mostly use APM, when doing AI assisted coding, I use multiple chat sessions at once, and I expect from my editor to offer good "agentic" behavior from its models. In Copilot, even the base model GPT 4.1 has been surprisingly stable when it comes to behaving as an Agent and not as a chat model.

What do you guys think? Does Cursor have such a huge user base that they dont give a flying fuck ab the portion of the Users that will migrate to other products?

I think they do, judging from the recent posts in this subreddit where they fish for User feedback and they suddenly start to become transparent ab their billing model...