Staxly

Cursor vs Helicone

AI-native code editor — VS Code fork with deep AI integration
vs. Open-source LLM observability — 1-line integration via proxy

Cursor website ↗Helicone website ↗

Pricing tiers

Cursor

Hobby (Free)
Free. Limited Agent requests + Tab completions. No credit card.
Free
Pro
$20/month. Extended Agent limits, frontier models, MCPs + skills + hooks, cloud agents.
$20/mo
Teams
$40/user/month. Shared chats + commands + rules, centralized billing, RBAC, SAML/OIDC SSO.
$40/mo
Pro+ (Recommended)
$60/month. Everything in Pro + 3x usage on OpenAI, Claude, Gemini.
$60/mo
Ultra
$200/month. 20x usage multiplier + priority access to new features.
$200/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Pooled usage, SCIM, AI code tracking API + audit logs, priority support.
Custom
Cursor website ↗

Helicone

Hobby (Free)
10,000 requests/month. 7-day retention. 1 seat. Basic monitoring.
Free
Startup Discount
<2 years, <$5M funding: 50% off first year.
$0 base (usage-based)
Self-Hosted (OSS)
MIT-licensed. Run Helicone yourself for free.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$79/month. 10k free + usage-based. Unlimited seats. Alerts, reports, HQL query language. 1-month retention.
$79/mo
Team
$799/month. 5 orgs, SOC-2 + HIPAA compliance, dedicated Slack, 3-month retention.
$799/mo
Enterprise
Custom MSA, SAML SSO, on-prem deploy, bulk discounts, forever retention.
Custom
Helicone website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing hobby on Cursor vs hobby on Helicone.

MetricCursorHelicone
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Cursor · 15 features

  • Agent Mode — Autonomous multi-file editing + tool use. Runs terminal commands with confirmati…
  • Background Agents — Run agents in the cloud to tackle longer tasks async.
  • BugBot (PR reviews) — AI reviewer on GitHub PRs.
  • Chat (⌘L) — Conversational chat with codebase context.
  • Cmd-K Inline Edit — Highlight code + ⌘K → natural language edit instruction.
  • Codebase Indexing — Embedding-based semantic search over your codebase.
  • Composer — Multi-file edit sessions with full context.
  • .cursorrules / Project Rules — Custom system prompts per project to steer the AI.
  • MCP Support — Add Model Context Protocol servers to extend agent capabilities.
  • Privacy Mode — Data never used for training; zero-retention routing.
  • Skills & Hooks — User-defined skills library + lifecycle hooks.
  • Tab (multi-line completion) — Predictive completions including next-edit suggestions.
  • Team Shared Context — Share chats, commands, rules across team.
  • VS Code Extension Compat — Most VS Code extensions work via the marketplace.
  • YOLO Mode — Auto-approve all agent actions (for trusted workflows).

Helicone · 16 features

  • Alerts — Thresholds on error rate, latency, cost, usage. Pro+.
  • Async Logging — Log AFTER the LLM call via SDK — zero added latency.
  • Cost Tracking — Automatic cost calculation per call by provider/model.
  • Dashboard — Request tables, aggregate metrics, cost breakdowns.
  • Evaluators — LLM-as-judge + custom evaluators on runs.
  • Experiments — A/B test different models/prompts.
  • HQL (SQL over traces) — Query your logged data with SQL. Pro+.
  • PII Redaction — Automatically scrub emails, credit cards, etc. from logs.
  • Prompt Caching — Cache identical requests → save money.
  • Prompts & Versions — Store + version + A/B test prompts.
  • Proxy Mode — 1-line integration via base URL swap. Captures all requests.
  • Rate Limiting — Per-user + per-key rate limit policies.
  • Reports — Scheduled email reports with KPIs.
  • Self-Hosting — Docker + k8s deployment.
  • Sessions — Group related calls (chat sessions, agent runs).
  • User Metrics — Per-user cost + usage segmentation.

Developer interfaces

KindCursorHelicone
CLICursor CLIHelicone CLI
SDK—helicone (npm), helicone-python
REST—Async Logging API, Helicone Proxy, Query API (HQL)
MCPCursor MCP support—
OTHERCursor Desktop App, Cursor Rules (.cursorrules), Privacy ModeHelicone Dashboard, Webhooks
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Cursor and Helicone are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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