Cursor vs Codex in 2026: which to pay for, and when to use both

Disclosure: Enjoy is our product, and it runs Codex, not Cursor. We checked every fact below against Cursor’s and OpenAI’s own pages on November 3, 2026, and we say where you don’t need Enjoy at all.

Cursor vs Codex, compared

Cursor and Codex come at the same job from opposite ends. Cursor is an AI code editor: you write code in it, its Tab autocomplete suggests the next lines as you type, and its agent takes on bigger tasks with Grok, Composer or, at API prices, other labs’ models. Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent: you describe a change, and it reads your project, edits files and runs commands until it’s done, in the ChatGPT desktop app, a terminal, your editor or OpenAI’s cloud, on a ChatGPT plan. This month adds a deadline: OpenAI has proposed to stop supplying its models to Cursor on November 12.

Option	Best for	Price, checked November 3, 2026	Runs on	Models
Cursor	An AI editor that suggests code as you type	Free; Plus $8 a month; Premium $30; Super $100; Ultra $200	Mac, Windows, Linux	Grok and Composer in the plan; Claude, GPT-5.6 and Gemini at API prices from Premium
Codex	Handing whole tasks to OpenAI’s GPT-6 models, on a ChatGPT plan	In every ChatGPT plan: Free and Go ($8 a month) with GPT-6 Luna in the desktop app; Plus $20; Pro $100, $200 or $500	Mac, Windows; Linux in preview; the CLI on all three	OpenAI’s GPT-6 models
Codex inside Cursor	Cursor’s editor, with GPT-6 on your ChatGPT plan	ChatGPT Plus or Pro, from $20 a month, plus your Cursor plan, from Free	Mac, Windows, Linux	GPT-6 in the extension; Cursor’s own features on your Cursor plan
Enjoy	Codex beside Claude Code, Grok Build and other labs’ agents	A monthly subscription on top of your plans, free for 7 days (pricing)	Mac, Windows, Linux	Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, Antigravity, Muse Code, OpenCode

Prices are each company’s list prices per month, before tax. Cursor also bills yearly, at $80 a year for Plus and $300 for Premium, and its Teams plan starts at $30 a seat a month.

How the two differ

	Cursor	Codex
What it is	An AI code editor, with an agent, a CLI and cloud agents	A coding agent, in the ChatGPT desktop app, a terminal, editor extensions and the cloud
Suggestions as you type	Tab, “Cursor’s AI-powered autocomplete”	None; you give it a task
OpenAI’s models	GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna, at API list price from Premium ($30), until the cutoff	GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna in the plan from Plus ($20); GPT-6 Luna on Free and Go
Cheapest paid plan	Plus, $8 a month, with Grok and Composer only	Go, $8 a month, with GPT-6 Luna in the desktop app only
Included usage	A weekly pool shared with Grok, of a size Cursor doesn’t publish	Five-hour and weekly limits, shared with ChatGPT Work, and with ChatGPT from December
Agents in the cloud	Cloud agents and automations, from Premium	Codex Cloud, from Plus
Project instructions	.cursor/rules, or AGENTS.md	AGENTS.md
On Windows	Native desktop app; the CLI natively or in WSL	Native desktop app with PowerShell and its Windows sandbox, or WSL 2

Cursor

Best for: writing code yourself with AI beside you, and Grok or Composer for $8 a month.

“Cursor is your coding agent for building ambitious software,” its homepage says, and its models page says Cursor “is sold as part of The X Subscription, one subscription for Grok, Cursor, and X.” The desktop app “is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.” Tab “is Cursor’s AI-powered autocomplete. It suggests code as you type, based on your recent edits, surrounding code, and linter errors.” For bigger jobs, the Agents Window, “Cursor’s agent-first interface,” runs “many parallel agents in the cloud,” with worktrees to “run agents in isolated Git checkouts.” Its CLI installs on macOS, Linux and Windows, natively or in WSL.

Price: Cursor’s pricing has Free, with “Limited agent requests”; Plus at $8 a month, where “Only Grok models are available on this plan,” and the models page lists Grok 4.7, 4.6 and 4.5 and Composer 2.5; Premium at $30, with four times Plus’s usage, “Cloud agents & automations” and “Third-party models at API list price”; Super at $100, with 15 times; and Ultra at $200, with 50 times.

Watch for: GPT is leaving. OpenAI told SpaceX it intends to wind down its contract supplying Cursor, “with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026,” while “not providing future models to Cursor.” So Cursor’s models page lists GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna, with Sol at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output from prepaid credit, and none of OpenAI’s GPT-6 models. OpenAI’s help page still calls the date a proposal it will confirm with Cursor, and says “Cursor may choose to end access sooner.” After it, your own OpenAI API key works only in Cursor’s local Chat and Agent: “Cursor doesn’t support ‘Bring your own key’ in Cursor Tab, Auto, Cloud or Background Agents, Automations, the Cursor CLI, or Cursor’s API and SDK.” Our memo on the cutoff has the details. Beyond GPT, “Plus and Free don’t include third-party models,” so Claude needs Premium and credit too, and what the plan does include is “one pool of usage for Cursor models,” refreshed weekly and shared with Grok, whose size Cursor’s usage page doesn’t give.

Codex

Best for: handing whole tasks to OpenAI’s newest models, on the ChatGPT plan you already pay for.

OpenAI’s desktop app is where Codex runs on your computer: “Run projects in parallel, work with files, use your computer, and keep long-running work moving from one desktop workspace.” It’s for macOS and Windows, and on Linux it “is available in preview.” On Windows, it “runs natively on Windows using PowerShell and the Windows sandbox,” or in WSL 2. The Codex CLI “is a coding agent from OpenAI that runs locally on your computer,” open source under Apache 2.0, and Codex Cloud takes “coding tasks to work through in the cloud” on your GitHub repositories. You don’t write the code in Codex: you say what you want, and review what it changed.

Price: Codex’s pricing gives Free, and Go at $8 a month, “GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app, subject to rollout.” Plus, at $20, adds “Codex on the web, in the CLI, in the IDE extension, and on iOS” and “GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna.” Pro is $100, $200 or $500 a month, and “Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit.” OpenAI estimates that Plus allows 15 to 160 local messages every five hours with GPT-6.1 Sol, and 5 to 45 with GPT-6 Astra. Our ChatGPT Plus vs Pro guide covers which to buy.

Watch for: OpenAI says its counts “are not fixed message limits,” and “Weekly limits may also apply.” Codex shares them with ChatGPT Work, and from December with chat too: “Starting in December, Plus, Pro, and Business plans’ usage allowance will be shared across ChatGPT and Codex,” says its help center, with no size given yet. Our memo on it has what’s known. Free and Go get one model, in one place: GPT-6 Luna, in the desktop app. And Codex doesn’t suggest code as you type, so if you still write much of the code yourself, you’ll want an editor beside it.

Both: Codex inside Cursor

Best for: keeping Cursor’s editor and Tab, with GPT-6 on your ChatGPT plan instead of Cursor’s credit.

OpenAI points Cursor users here itself. Its help page says the Codex IDE extension “lets you use the Codex agent directly inside Cursor,” signed in with ChatGPT or an API key, and that “It runs as a separate extension and does not depend on OpenAI models being available through Cursor’s own model picker,” so the cutoff doesn’t touch it. The extension’s page lists Cursor beside VS Code and Windsurf. One instruction file serves both: “Cursor supports AGENTS.md in the project root and subdirectories,” per its rules page, and “Codex reads AGENTS.md files before doing any work,” per OpenAI’s docs.

Price: ChatGPT Plus, at $20 a month, or Pro, plus your Cursor plan, from Free. Codex’s pricing lists the IDE extension from Plus; for Free and Go it lists only the desktop app.

Watch for: it’s a separate agent in its own sidebar. “It does not change the model used by Cursor Chat, Agent, Tab, Auto, Cloud Agents, or other Cursor services,” so Cursor’s own agent doesn’t get GPT-6, and Tab stays on your Cursor plan. And OpenAI calls its Cursor guidance “directional”: “Cursor might change the functionality and availability of these features over time.”

Enjoy

Best for: Codex with other labs’ agents in one conversation, when you’d rather describe a change than type it.

Enjoy is a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux that runs Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, Antigravity, Muse Code, and local models through OpenCode, each signed in with the plan you already have. It doesn’t run Cursor; it’s another way to run Codex, and it adds:

• Another agent, mid-conversation. Hand a job from Codex to Claude Code or Grok Build: “The new agent gets the conversation so far, including replies from other agents, before it works on your message.” If you keep The X Subscription for Cursor, its pricing lists Grok Build on Plus and above, and Enjoy’s Grok Build “signs in with your Grok or X account.”
• Limits handled. When Codex runs out, Enjoy switches to another of your accounts with usage left, or waits for the reset and carries on. When OpenAI gives your account a free reset, Enjoy shows it beside your usage.
• Your code, in view. Project files open “in a code editor with line numbers and colors for the file’s language,” per its help, and agents open your site beside the conversation and try it.
• Your history, brought along. Open your Codex projects in Enjoy and import their conversations.

Price: Enjoy is one monthly subscription, and the first seven days are free, with a card to start. It includes your phone and any browser and your other computers, and each teammate you invite needs a subscription of their own. See pricing.

Watch for: Enjoy isn’t an editor in Cursor’s sense. Its code editor doesn’t suggest code as you type: the agents write the code. It doesn’t run Cursor’s agent or Composer, it doesn’t put GPT back into Cursor, and it doesn’t add GPT to a Grok or Claude account: each agent runs on its own company’s plan. Waiting out a limit needs “Your computer must be on, with Enjoy open, when the usage resets,” and scheduled workflows also run only while it’s awake with Enjoy open. Enjoy isn’t open source, and it’s a monthly subscription on top of your AI plans once the free week ends.

When to stay with the one you have

Stay with Cursor if you write much of the code yourself and Tab is what you’d miss, or if Grok and Composer do your work: Plus, at $8 a month, costs less than ChatGPT Plus, the cheapest plan with Codex in an editor. If GPT-5.6 is enough, OpenAI says your own API key keeps it in Cursor’s local Chat and Agent, at API prices. And if you’re on a legacy Pro, Pro+ or Ultra plan, “Your current plan, price, and features continue unless you change or cancel,” says Cursor’s help center, though moving to The X Subscription “is permanent.”

Stay with Codex if you already hand it whole tasks and rarely miss an editor’s suggestions: paying Cursor on top buys an editor and Grok, while GPT there is the older GPT-5.6, billed separately.

Move from Cursor to Codex, or add it, when GPT is the model you reach for: Cursor doesn’t offer GPT-6, and after the cutoff its own agent reaches GPT only through your API key. Move from Codex to Cursor, or add it, when you want suggestions as you type, or Grok’s models for $8.

How we compared

We read Cursor’s homepage, pricing, models, usage, downloads, Tab, Agents Window, CLI and rules pages and its X Subscription and legacy plans pages; OpenAI’s decision on Cursor and its help pages on Cursor, Pro and usage limits; and ChatGPT’s pricing and Codex’s pricing, desktop app, CLI, IDE extension, cloud and AGENTS.md docs, all on November 3, 2026, and every one is linked below. We quote each company’s own words for its limits and leave out what it hasn’t documented, such as the size of Cursor’s weekly pool, the size of ChatGPT’s shared allowance, or whether November 12 will hold. Plans and models change often, so we recheck this guide against its sources at least once a month, and the date at the foot of the page says when we last did.