OpenCode vs Cursor (2026): The $0 Open-Source Agent vs the $20/mo IDE

What Changed Recently (Aug to Sep 2026)

• Sep 21, 2026: Cursor released Grok 4.7. OpenCode v1.18.32 added Grok 4.7 to Zen and Go.
• Sep 11, 2026: OpenCode v2.0.0 published as @opencode/cli, with a new plugin API and a single cli.json TUI config.
• Sep 10, 2026: Cursor Projects (beta). A coordinator agent plans work and delegates to subagents.
• Sep 2, 2026: Cursor self-hosted machines. Cloud agents can run on your own workers, with computer use on Linux and Mac.
• Aug 24, 2026: OpenCode dropped the Go first-month discount.
• Aug 17, 2026: Cursor Origin code hosting (early beta, paid plans) with two-way GitHub sync.
• Aug 14, 2026: Cursor became part of SpaceX.

OpenCode vs Cursor: Head-to-Head

Pricing: OpenCode vs Cursor (Cursor Pro vs OpenCode Go)

OpenCode is free software. Your bill is whatever provider you connect, at the provider's rate with no markup. OpenCode Go is an optional $10/month subscription to a tested set of open models. Cursor bundles model usage into each tier and splits it into two pools that reset monthly, according to Cursor's models docs: a Cursor Models pool with more included usage for Composer 2.5 and Grok 4.5 through 4.7, and an Other Models pool for Claude, GPT, and Gemini at each model's API price. Auto mode runs on Cursor Router (July 22, 2026), with Cost, Balance, and Intelligence modes, and bills at the routed model's rate. The public pricing page labels the $20 tier "Individual". The docs call it Pro and add Pro Plus and Ultra.

Cursor lists per-token rates for its own models. Composer 2.5 is $0.50 in and $2.50 out per 1M tokens, and Grok 4.7 is $2 in and $6 out. Once included usage runs out, Cursor bills on-demand usage in arrears. Pro and above also include MCPs, skills, hooks, cloud agents, and Bugbot on usage-based billing (cursor.com/pricing). Teams and Enterprise pay the Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per 1M tokens on top of API price for third-party models. That covers included usage, on-demand usage, and BYOK. Grok and Composer are exempt. In India, Cursor Start (July 28, 2026) costs ₹649/month and covers only the Cursor Models pool.

Cursor Pro vs OpenCode Go

OpenCode Go costs $10/month and gives an API key you paste into OpenCode with /connect. Its model list includes GLM-5.3, GLM-5.3-Flash, Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4 Pro and Flash, Qwen3.8, MiniMax M3, and Grok 4.7. Each model has a monthly dollar limit. The 5-hour cap is 20% of it and the weekly cap is 50%. The Go docs estimate about 490 Kimi K3 requests a month, 1,080 for GLM-5.3, and 31,580 for GLM-5.3-Flash. When you hit the cap, a "Use balance" toggle can fall back to prepaid Zen credits instead of blocking. OpenCode removed the Go first-month discount on August 24, 2026 (v1.18.22), so $10 is the full price. Go has no Claude, no Tab completions, and no editor. Cursor Pro at $20 is the pick if you want frontier closed models and the IDE in one bill.

Model Access: 75+ Providers vs a Bundle

OpenCode connects to 75 or more LLM providers through the AI SDK and the Models.dev catalog, plus local models via Ollama, LM Studio, and llama.cpp (OpenCode providers docs). Adding a custom OpenAI-compatible provider is a JSON block:

{
  "provider": {
    "myprovider": {
      "npm": "@ai-sdk/openai-compatible",
      "options": { "baseURL": "https://api.myprovider.com/v1" },
      "models": { }
    }
  }
}

OpenCode Zen is the team's pay-as-you-go catalog of models tested for agentic coding, and Go is the $10 subscription on top of it. OpenCode docs state that Anthropic explicitly prohibits using a Claude Pro or Max subscription inside third-party tools, and that OpenCode stopped bundling those plugins as of v1.3.0. ChatGPT Plus, GitHub Copilot, and GitLab Duo subscriptions work with zero setup.

Cursor offers Composer 2.5, Grok 4.5 through 4.7, and third-party models including Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Kimi K3, GLM 5.2, and Muse Spark 1.3. Cursor does support your own API key for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure OpenAI, and AWS Bedrock. Two details from Cursor's BYOK docs matter. Custom keys only work with chat models, so Tab still uses Cursor's models. And every BYOK request is routed through Cursor's servers for prompt building, so Zero Data Retention does not apply. On Teams and Enterprise, BYOK requests still carry the Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per 1M tokens.

Can You Use a Cursor Subscription in OpenCode?

Not officially. Cursor does not appear in OpenCode's provider list, and neither company documents it. Several community plugins fill the gap. The most-starred, ephraimduncan/opencode-cursor (279 stars), logs in to Cursor through a browser PKCE OAuth flow and runs a local proxy that translates OpenAI-style chat requests into Cursor's private gRPC protocol:

// ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json (OpenCode v1)
{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "plugin": ["opencode-cursor-oauth"]
}

# then
opencode auth login --provider cursor

Treat this as unsupported. It depends on a reverse-engineered protocol that Cursor can change at any time, and it sits in the same gray zone as the Claude Pro/Max plugins that OpenCode stopped bundling in v1.3.0 after Anthropic prohibited that use. If you want Cursor's models in a terminal, the supported route is Cursor CLI. If you want OpenCode, give it a separate API key or an OpenCode Go key.

Cursor CLI vs OpenCode

Cursor now ships its own terminal agent, which makes "Cursor CLI vs OpenCode" a closer fight than the IDE comparison. Per the Cursor CLI docs, the binary is agent. It has interactive mode, a print mode for scripts and CI (agent -p "..." --model ...), plan mode, ask mode, agent resume, and sandbox controls. Prefixing a message with & hands the task to a Cursor cloud agent. The August 26, 2026 CLI release added persistent sessions with agent persist and /detach.

Install Commands

OpenCode v1 installs from a single line and works across most package managers:

# Install script
curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/install | bash

# npm
npm install -g opencode-ai

# Homebrew
brew install anomalyco/tap/opencode

It also ships via Bun, pnpm, Yarn, pacman/paru, Chocolatey, Scoop, Mise, and Docker. The repo moved to anomalyco/opencode (the old sst/opencode redirects there). OpenCode v2 has its own installers and a desktop app. Both lines install the opencode command, and the v2 curl installer replaces the v1 binary. v2 reads your v1 opencode.json as-is, but v1 plugins do not run on v2. Installers per opencode.ai/download:

# OpenCode v2 terminal
curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/v2/install | bash
npm install -g @opencode/cli
brew install anomalyco/tap/opencode-v2

# OpenCode v2 desktop (macOS)
brew install --cask opencode-desktop

# Cursor CLI
curl https://cursor.com/install -fsS | bash

The Cursor editor installs as a desktop application download from cursor.com.

OpenCode in Cursor: Using Both Together

You do not have to choose. OpenCode ships an extension for VS Code and its forks, including Cursor, Windsurf, and VSCodium (OpenCode IDE docs). Run opencode in Cursor's integrated terminal and the extension installs itself. Cmd+Esc (Ctrl+Esc on Windows/Linux) opens OpenCode in a split terminal, Cmd+Shift+Esc starts a new session, and Cmd+Option+K inserts a file reference like @File#L37-42. Your current selection is shared with OpenCode as context.

The gotcha: auto-install needs the cursor shell command on your PATH. If the extension does not appear, check that cursor resolves in your shell, or search for OpenCode in the extension marketplace and install it by hand. This setup keeps Cursor's Tab completions and diff UI while OpenCode runs the agent loop on whatever model key you give it.

Where OpenCode Wins

Where Cursor Wins

For a wider field of Cursor competitors with benchmarks, see Cursor alternatives. For other open-source agents, see OpenCode vs Cline and OpenCode vs Claude Code.

Best Models to Run in OpenCode

Because OpenCode is BYO key, the model you point it at decides quality and cost. Artificial Analysis runs full agent-plus-model pairs on its Coding Agent Index v1.5. OpenCode with GLM-5.3 scores 53.6 at an average $4.24 per task. Claude Code with Opus 5 scores 59.7 at $10.79 per task, and Codex with GPT-6 Sol scores 56.7 at $2.99. That puts an open-weight model in OpenCode within about 6 points of Claude Code at 39% of the per-task cost. Cursor is not on that index, so there is no independent head-to-head score for Cursor vs OpenCode yet; the site's harness comparison section is marked "coming soon".

For open-source models and codegen specifically, where you run the model matters as much as which model. Morph Open Source Models serves DeepSeek with full 16-bit (bf16) activations and no fp8 or int8 quantization. Most serverless providers quantize activations to fp8 to cut cost, which degrades output quality; Morph keeps full 16-bit activations so responses match the reference weights.

For coding agents, Morph runs codegen-specific speculative decoding plus custom inference kernels built for code generation. morph-dsv4flash (DeepSeek V4 Flash) is $0.141953125 per 1M input tokens and $0.399625 per 1M output tokens. Point OpenCode at it as a custom OpenAI-compatible provider using the JSON block above.

See Morph Open Source Models and pricing for the full catalog and rates.

Decision Framework

Frequently Asked Questions