Cursor vs Zed

Which one do AI engines recommend, and how do they differ on price, fit and features?

The short answer

Cursor is the stronger AI pick in AI Coding Assistants: it has a visibility score of 67.7 versus 1 for Zed, and ranks ahead in 100% of the answers that name both.

Choose Cursor if…

You want the brand AI engines rank higher (67.7 vs 1)
AI answers describe it more positively (53% vs 50% positive)
You need AIUC-1 or ISO/IEC 27001:2022 or ISO/IEC 42001:2023 or SOC 2 Type II coverage
You prefer a larger, established vendor (501–1,000 employees)

Choose Zed if…

Ideal for small teams already on GitHub
Works with VS Code and JetBrains

AI visibility side by side

Latest weekly run · Nov 3

Metric	Cursor	Zed
Visibility score	67.7%	1%
Change vs last week	New	New
Rank in AI Coding Assistants	#2	#26
Share of voice	13.6%	0.4%
Mentions this run	65	2
Positive in AI answers	53%	50%

The stronger value in each row is marked with a ✓.

Visibility score trend

Weekly runs over the last 60 days

Cursor 0pp · Zed 0pp over 0 weekly runs.

Engine by engine

Cursor leads on 3 of 3 engines

ChatGPT

78.7%

0.9%

AI Mode

73.5%

Perplexity

50.9%

CursorZed

Head to head in AI answers

2 engine answers name both brands

2Cursor ranked higher

0Zed ranked higher

Prompt	Engine	Cursor	Zed
Is there a free AI coding assistant for small teams?	AI Mode	#2	#4
Official website of the top AI coding assistant vendors	ChatGPT	#4	#16

Features, pricing & fit

Dimension	Cursor	Zed
Pricing model	—	Per seat
Entry price	—	Free; paid from $10 per seat / mo
Free plan	—	Yes
Deployment	Desktop, CLI, web, mobile and cloud agents	Desktop editor on Windows, macOS and Linux, with remote development over SSH, WSL and dev containers. Users can run local Ollama models, and API keys for hosted providers are kept on the local machine.
Compliance	AIUC-1, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO/IEC 42001:2023, SOC 2 Type II	—
Support	Customer support by email at hi@cursor.com, Priority support on the Enterprise plan	—
Founded	—	2021
Headquarters	—	Boulder, Colorado
Employees	501–1,000	11–50
Funding	Funding round at $9.9B valuation	Series B · $42M raised
Best for	Individual developers and engineering teams that hand coding tasks to AI agents, and larger organizations that need enterprise security and admin controls.	Developers who want a fast editor with AI optional, and teams that need org-level control over AI features and data sharing through the Business plan.