GitHub Copilot review: Still solid, but Cursor has lapped it

GitHub Copilot launched in 2021 and quietly became the most consequential developer tool of the decade. It wasn't the first AI code assistant. It was the first one that worked well enough that engineers kept using it after the novelty wore off. Three and a half years later, I still pay for it. I also pay for Cursor. That second sentence tells you most of what you need to know about where Copilot stands today.

This is a review by someone who has used Copilot every day for years and who has watched it slowly become the second-best option for the work I do most. It's still a very good tool. It's just no longer the obvious one.

What Copilot still does well

The best thing Copilot has is breadth. It runs in VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Vim, Neovim, Visual Studio, Xcode, Eclipse, and Azure Data Studio. If you use any of those, Copilot is a one-click install away from working in your existing editor with your existing keybindings and extensions. That sounds mundane until you've spent a weekend trying to migrate to a new editor and given up halfway through.

The autocomplete itself is reliable in a way that matters. Copilot doesn't generate the most ambitious suggestions, but it generates competent ones, fast, and they're usually right enough. If you write JavaScript or TypeScript, you'll feel it most clearly. It knows how the libraries you import work. It writes the imports for you. It catches the patterns in your existing code and follows them. After enough hours, you forget it's even there until you go a day without it, and the friction is suddenly visible.

The GitHub integration is another quiet win. Copilot Chat understands your repository when you've connected it. Asking "where do we handle 401 responses?" gets you specific file references, not generic advice. Pull request summaries are generated automatically. There's a Code Review feature that runs Copilot over your PR diff and surfaces issues. None of these are world-changing individually, but they reduce a kind of friction that adds up across a workday.

Where it falls behind

Cursor is what happened. The AI editor I used to think was a curiosity grew into a genuinely better experience for the work most engineers do: refactoring existing code, navigating large codebases, executing multi-file changes from a single prompt. Copilot has been catching up. "Workspace" context, "Agent mode" for edits across files, multi-model support (Claude, GPT-5, o1 alongside Copilot's older models). These are all good additions, but they feel reactive rather than native to the product.

The clearest case for me is Agent mode. In Cursor, asking the agent to "add error handling to all the database calls in this service" produces a diff across however many files are involved, applied correctly, with explanations. In Copilot, you can get a similar result, but the interface is more disjointed, the iteration loop is slower, and the agent sometimes loses track of context partway through a multi-step task. Both tools can do the work; one of them feels designed for the work.

The model choice issue. Copilot now supports multiple frontier models - Claude Sonnet, GPT-5, the o-series for reasoning. That's a feature on paper, but the switching is friction. You're constantly deciding which model to use for which task, and the wrong choice means worse output. Cursor handles this better with sensible defaults and a less prominent model picker.

Pricing has gotten interesting

Copilot Individual is $10/month. Copilot Pro is $19/month, the price tier that unlocks the newest models and higher request limits. Copilot Business is $19/month per user. Copilot Enterprise is $39/month per user with audit logs, IP-protected indemnification, and admin controls.

Compared to Cursor's $20/month flat (or $40 for Business), Copilot at $10/month is meaningfully cheaper for the entry tier. For students, hobbyists, and indie developers, that price gap matters. For working developers where saving an hour pays for either tool a hundred times over, the cost difference is noise.

The free tier deserves a mention. GitHub Copilot has a free tier with 2,000 completions per month and 50 chat messages. That's a real product, not just a marketing teaser. If you're not sure AI coding is for you, you can find out for free for a while.

Who Copilot is still the right answer for

After all of that, here's where I'd still pick Copilot over Cursor:

If you work in JetBrains (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm) and don't want to switch to a VS Code fork, Copilot is meaningfully better than the alternatives for those IDEs. Cursor doesn't run there. JetBrains' own Junie agent is improving but not yet at Copilot's polish.

If you use Vim or Neovim and want AI in your terminal, Copilot's vim plugin works well. Cursor has nothing comparable.

If your team is already on GitHub Enterprise, the IT story for adopting Copilot is dramatically simpler. SSO, audit logs, IP indemnification, the whole thing comes ready to deploy. Cursor's Business plan covers most of this but it's a separate vendor relationship.

If you write code for a hobby or are still learning, the $10/month tier is the most generous floor for AI-assisted programming. Cursor's pricing skips that step.

What I do in practice

I use Cursor as my main editor and keep Copilot installed as a fallback in the IDEs Cursor doesn't support. When I'm pair-programming with someone whose editor I can't change, I use whatever works there. When I'm writing in Cursor on my own time, I rarely open Copilot.

This isn't a "Copilot is bad" review. It's a "Copilot is good and Cursor is better for my specific work" review. If your work or your editor preferences don't match mine, your conclusion might flip.

Verdict

GitHub Copilot is a competent, reliable AI coding tool that runs in more places than its competitors and costs less than most. It's no longer the obvious choice for VS Code developers doing serious work - Cursor has earned that title - but it remains the right answer for anyone in JetBrains, Vim, or the GitHub-tied enterprise universe.

If you're starting out and want a low-stakes way into AI coding, Copilot Individual at $10/month is the easiest yes in this category. If you've never used an AI coding assistant and you're a working VS Code developer, install Cursor first and try Copilot as the backup. The right answer in 2026 depends entirely on which editor you can't or won't change.