Cursor vs Replit

Cursor if you have a codebase; Replit if you need somewhere to run one.

Cursor is an editor rebuilt around AI. It indexes your whole repository, so its edits follow your conventions and land across multiple files coherently — the thing lighter assistants get wrong. Being a VS Code fork, your extensions and keybindings carry over, so adoption costs an afternoon. For a professional developer working in existing code, it is the stronger tool by some margin.

Replit is a platform, not an editor. Editor, database, secrets, hosting, and domains sit in one browser tab, so an app its Agent builds is genuinely deployed rather than merely demonstrated. It runs on any machine including a Chromebook, and its real-time collaboration is excellent for teaching and pairing.

The costs differ in kind. Cursor is a predictable per-seat subscription that throttles you to weaker models when you exhaust requests. Replit bills agent usage on top of the subscription, and consumption is genuinely hard to predict — watch your first few builds closely. Both produce code that needs reading before it ships.