Claude vs Cursor: plan limits and pricing

Cursor has the lower entry price. Claude Pro is $20/mo; Cursor Plus is $8/mo. Prices from the vendors' pricing pages, checked 2026-10-30.

Claude: Every plan has usage limits that reset on a rolling five-hour session window; paid plans (Pro, Max, Team, seat-based Enterprise) add weekly limits that reset at a fixed time assigned to the account, and Max plans (and Team premium seats) have a separate weekly limit for Fable. Usage across Claude on web, desktop, mobile, Claude Desktop and Claude Code draws from the same pool. Anthropic publishes no fixed message count: usage depends on conversation length and complexity, attached files, the model, effort level and features used. Anthropic publishes multipliers instead: Pro is at least 5x Free per session, Max is 5x or 20x Pro, Team standard is 1.25x Pro and Team premium is 6.25x Pro. Anthropic may also apply weekly and monthly caps or model/feature limits at its discretion. When a limit is reached, paid users can enable usage credits billed at standard API rates. Usage-based Enterprise seats include no usage allowance; all tokens are billed at API rates. Cursor: Cursor is sold as part of The X Subscription (Grok, Cursor and X). Every paid plan includes one weekly pool of usage for Cursor models (Grok 4.7, Grok 4.6, Grok 4.5 and Composer 2.5), shared across Agent in the editor, CLI, Cloud Agents, Grok Bot and the Grok apps; different models draw from the pool at different rates and unused usage does not roll over. Tiers are expressed as multiples of the Plus pool (Plus = Base, Premium 4x, Super 15x, Ultra 50x); Cursor publishes no request or credit counts. Third-party models (Claude, GPT, Gemini) are not in the pool: on Premium and above they are billed at API list price from the first request out of prepaid credit; Free and Plus cannot use them. Prepaid credit (manual top-ups or Auto Top-up) also pays for Cursor-model usage beyond the weekly pool at the same per-model rates; credit expires 365 days after purchase and a monthly additional usage limit can cap spend. Teams and Enterprise pay an extra Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million tokens on eligible third-party requests (including BYOK). Grok API usage is billed separately and does not draw from the pool.

Claude Free is free: Session usage, Free covers everyday questions; limit resets on a rolling five-hour window; Claude Code, Not included; Projects, Up to 5; Context window, Up to 1M, varies by model; Fable, Not available. Cursor Free is free: AI usage, Limited agent requests; Limited Chat requests; Third-party models, Not available.

Claude: five-hour window, week, month. Cursor: week. The figure inside each window is listed per plan on this page, or marked "not published" where the vendor gives none.