A comprehensive cursor overview: Features, pricing & alternatives (2025)

If you’re a developer, you’ve probably noticed that AI-powered code editors are everywhere these days. They’re moving from a cool novelty to a standard part of a modern dev toolkit. One of the most talked-about names in this space is Cursor, an AI-first editor that’s getting a lot of attention for just how much it can do.

In this Cursor overview, we’ll break down what it is, what its core features feel like to use, how much it costs, and some of the real-world limitations you should know about. We’ll explore what makes it a powerful coding partner and where it fits into the larger picture of building and supporting software.

What is Cursor?

At its core, Cursor is a code editor built on top of Visual Studio Code. This was a really smart decision because it means most of us can jump in and feel right at home with the interface and keyboard shortcuts we already know. No steep learning curve.

The whole point of Cursor is to weave AI directly into the coding process. It hooks into powerful language models from OpenAI (like GPT-4o) and Anthropic (like Claude 3.5 Sonnet) to help you with pretty much everything. We’re talking about generating new code, cleaning up old and messy functions, hunting down bugs, and even writing documentation. It’s designed to feel less like a tool and more like a pair-programming partner, whether you’re a junior dev or a seasoned veteran.

Core AI coding features: Your AI pair programmer

Cursor is a lot more than just a fancy autocomplete. It has a whole suite of AI features that can handle both small tweaks and huge architectural changes, making it feel more like a collaborator than a simple tool. These are the features you’ll likely find yourself using every day.

Agent and Composer for the big stuff

For those big, hairy tasks that span multiple files, you have the Agent. You can think of it as an assistant you can hand off complex jobs to. Instead of telling it to change a specific line, you can give it a broader goal like, "refactor the entire user authentication module to use JWTs" or "add unit tests for all the services in this folder." The Agent can even run terminal commands to install packages or run tests to verify its own work.

And for really ambitious projects, there’s Composer. This feature can generate whole applications or complex features from a simple plain-English description. You could outline a new app idea, and Composer will spin up a functional, multi-file codebase to get you started. It’s a wild way to turn a vague idea into actual code in just a few minutes.

Inline edits with Cmd+K and Tab

The day-to-day magic of Cursor really shines with its inline editing. The "Cmd+K" shortcut will quickly become your best friend. Just highlight a chunk of code, hit the shortcut, and type what you need: "pull this out into its own function," "what’s the bug here?," or "add comments to explain this part." It’s a really smooth way to make changes without losing your focus.

The Tab key also gets a major upgrade. It’s not just for standard autocomplete anymore. It’s a predictive engine that understands the context of your entire file. As you start writing a function, it can intelligently guess what you’re doing and complete the entire block, saving you a ton of typing.

Chat your way through problems

When you’re stuck on a more complicated problem, you can pop open a dedicated chat panel with "Cmd+L". This is where you can have a real conversation with the AI. It’s great for brainstorming different ways to tackle a problem, getting a high-level explanation of some legacy code you’ve never seen before, or working through a tricky debugging session.

One of the best little features here is the "Apply" button. When the AI gives you a code snippet you like, you can pop it directly into your file with one click. No more awkward copy-pasting from a different window.

The intelligence engine: How it gets it

What makes Cursor so effective isn’t just the features themselves, but how they work. Its ability to grasp the full context of your project is what really makes it stand out. Let’s take a quick look at what’s going on under the hood.

Understanding your whole codebase with @-mentions

This is probably Cursor’s biggest superpower. It can index and understand your entire codebase, not just the single file you have open. You can give it very specific context in any prompt using the @ symbol.

For instance, you can use @Files to point it to specific files, @Folders to include entire directories, or @Codebase to let it scan the whole project for relevant info. You can even use @Docs to point it toward external documentation, making sure its suggestions are aligned with the right library versions and best practices.

Access to the best AI models

Cursor doesn’t lock you into a single AI model. You get to pick from a list of top-tier models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. This is super practical. For a quick job like completing a line of code, you can use a faster, lighter model. But for complex architectural thinking, you can switch over to a more powerful (and slightly slower) model.

Model	Best For	Key Characteristic
GPT-4o	Complex reasoning, multi-step tasks	High intelligence, slower
Claude 3.5 Sonnet	Nuanced understanding, creative code	Excellent for text, fast
cursor-small	Quick completions, simple edits	Very fast, unlimited use

Custom rules and settings for power users

If you like to tinker, Cursor gives you a lot of control. You can create a ".cursorrules" file in your project’s root folder to give the AI project-specific instructions that stick around. For example, you could add a rule that says, "always use TypeScript interfaces instead of types," and the AI will follow that guideline for all of its suggestions in that project.

There’s also an advanced "YOLO mode" in the settings. This gives the AI permission to automatically run tests and commands to fix errors on its own, trying again and again until the build passes. It’s a pretty bold step toward a more autonomous coding experience.

Real-world workflow: Where code-only tools fall short

A great developer tool has to fit into your existing workflow, not force you to change it. Cursor does a pretty good job here by playing nicely with the tools you already use.

Integrations and ecosystem

Cursor integrates well with Git, and it even has a feature to generate commit messages based on the changes you’ve made. It also connects with GitHub for its "AI Review" and "Bug Finder" features, which can scan pull requests to spot potential bugs or style issues. For teams, it can even hook into tools like Slack to bring AI help into your team chats.

Common challenges and limitations

As powerful as it is, Cursor isn’t a silver bullet. Users sometimes report that the code it generates can be a bit unreliable or have subtle bugs that you have to fix manually. The AI can also get stumped by really complex or brand-new problems where there isn’t a lot of existing code to learn from.

This quick demo provides a visual Cursor overview of its most popular AI features in action.

But there’s a more fundamental issue here: the knowledge silo. Cursor is an expert on your code, but it knows nothing about the customer context living in helpdesk tickets, internal wikis, or support chats. A developer might use Cursor to fix a bug in a few minutes, which is great, but that’s only half the job. The other half is explaining that fix to the customer-facing teams who need to know about it.

Cursor is fantastic at the code-fixing part, but the critical step of sharing that solution with support teams is still a manual, slow process. This is exactly where a tool like eesel AI fills the void. It connects directly to your helpdesks like Zendesk and your knowledge bases like Confluence. This means that a fix an engineer just pushed is instantly available to your support agents. It helps stop repetitive questions and deflects tickets, closing the loop that developer-only tools leave open.

Pricing plans

Cursor has a few pricing tiers, so it’s accessible for solo developers but also has plans with more features for professional teams. Here’s a quick look at their plans.

Plan	Price (Monthly)	Key Features	Best For
Hobby	Free	Limited "fast" AI model requests, unlimited "slow" requests.	Individual developers
Pro	$20 / month	500 fast requests, access to top models (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5), codebase indexing.	Professional developers
Business	$40 / user / month	Everything in Pro, plus team management, SAML SSO, and advanced security.	Teams and organizations

The Pro plan is very reasonably priced for a professional developer, but the Business plan can start to get expensive for bigger teams. It’s a cost worth thinking about, especially since it solves a developer-specific problem without tackling the cross-departmental knowledge sharing that can really slow a company down.

Is it the right tool for your team?

So, what’s the verdict? Cursor is definitely one of the most impressive AI code editors out there. It can give an individual developer a serious productivity boost by acting as a smart, context-aware coding partner. Its real strength is its deep, AI-powered understanding of a codebase.

But that strength is also tied to its biggest limitation. It lives and breathes inside a developer-focused world, which means it’s disconnected from all the important customer knowledge that support, sales, and success teams depend on.

The bigger picture: From code creation to customer support

If your goal is to speed up development and streamline your entire support operation, a tool like eesel AI is the piece you might be missing. It brings together knowledge from every part of your company, letting you go live with powerful AI agents in minutes, not months. You can simulate its performance without risk and see exactly how it helps your team get the information they need, right when they need it.

See how eesel’s AI agents can connect knowledge across your company to provide instant, accurate support.