Aider vs Cursor

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

	Aider OSS AI pair programmer for the terminal; multi-model, git-native.	Cursor AI-native code editor (VS Code fork) with agent mode, codebase indexing.
Category	harness	harness
Vendor type	open source	commercial
Pricing	free	subscription
Strengths	+ Fully open source + Multi-model (Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, local) + Git-native commit-per-change workflow	+ Polished IDE UX + Strong codebase indexing + Multi-model support
Tradeoffs	− Less polished than IDE-based harnesses − No managed plugin ecosystem	− Closed product surface; less programmable than CLI harnesses
Used in stacks	1	0