Head to head
The AI-first code editor — a VS Code fork built around inline edits, tab completion and an in-editor agent. Versus: anthropic's terminal-first coding agent — the tool that defined the agentic CLI category and still drives the most spend on the board. Whether you searched Cursor vs Claude Code or Claude Code vs Cursor, this page compares them on what developers actually run: 1,187 developers' monthly spend, tokens per day and overlap from ccusage data submitted to the leaderboard.
API-equivalent spend per developer per month, one row per developer, normalised to 30 days. Spend covers every tool a developer runs; the single-tool row isolates one. Medians are hidden below 10 developers. Methodology.
| Cursor | Claude Code | |
|---|---|---|
| Developers measured | 5 | 1,187 |
| Median monthly spend (all tools) | — | $1,540/mo |
| Median, single-tool devs | — (n=0) | $1,163/mo (n=678) |
| Median tokens / day | — | 53.5M |
| Also use the other | 100% | 0% |
| Cursor | Claude Code | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Anysphere | Anthropic |
| Pricing | Free Hobby tier; Pro, Pro+ and Ultra subscriptions with usage-based limits | Included with Claude Pro ($20/mo) and Max ($100–$200/mo), or pay-as-you-go via the Claude API |
| Models | Multi-model (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) plus Cursor's own models | Claude models (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku) |
| Devs on board | 5 | 1,244 |
| Top spender | $224,396 · 293.2B tokens | $1,810,971 · 3.1T tokens |
Claude Code has more developers on the board (1,187 vs 5), and 100% of Cursor developers also use Claude Code. Many people don't pick one; they run both and route work between them.
There are too few single-tool Cursor developers on the board yet to quote a fair median cost, so we don't. Compare the plan prices above against your own volume (npx ccusage@latest daily).
Pick Cursor if you want AI inside an editor, with inline diffs and completions, more than a terminal agent. Pick Claude Code if you want a terminal agent that runs long, multi-step tasks on Claude models and you'll use it enough to justify a Max plan.
Where do you land?
One command reads your local Cursor and Claude Code logs and puts your real usage on the board — code and prompts never leave your machine.
npx viberank-cliNeither wins across the board, and we don't publish benchmark scores we didn't run. What we can measure: Cursor has 5 developers on the board and Claude Code has 1,244, and 5 developers use both. Pick Cursor if you want AI inside an editor, with inline diffs and completions, more than a terminal agent. Pick Claude Code if you want a terminal agent that runs long, multi-step tasks on Claude models and you'll use it enough to justify a Max plan.
On list price: Cursor is free Hobby tier; Pro, Pro+ and Ultra subscriptions with usage-based limits; Claude Code is included with Claude Pro ($20/mo) and Max ($100–$200/mo), or pay-as-you-go via the Claude API. Too few developers use only one of the two for a fair median cost comparison (we need at least 10 on each side). Run npx ccusage@latest daily to see what your own usage is worth.
On the Viberank leaderboard, Claude Code currently has more developers submitting real usage data (1,244 vs 5). Adoption shifts monthly — the numbers on this page update from live ccusage submissions.
Yes: 5 developers on the board do. ccusage reads local logs from every supported agent, and a single npx viberank-cli submission records your usage per tool, so your profile shows how your spend splits between them.
From developers who submit their ccusage data to Viberank: token counts and API-equivalent cost computed from local session logs, validated server-side. Each developer counts once (their largest submission), normalised to a 30-day month; submissions under 7 days are left out. Spend covers every tool the developer ran, so the single-tool rows are the cleanest read on one tool. Medians are hidden below 10 developers. It is what the usage would cost at list prices, not what anyone was billed.
Related reading: Cursor vs Claude Code vs Copilot in depth, what Claude Code actually costs, or which subscription your usage justifies.