Antigravity vs Cursor — the free agent platform against the paid editor
Antigravity is free and generally available; Cursor starts at $20. On Artificial Analysis's Coding Agent Index, Google's harness scores 56.6 against Cursor CLI's 47.1, at $1.40 a task versus $2.00. Free has a shape, though: the quota refreshes weekly unless you hold a Google AI plan, there is no bring-your-own-key, and free users cannot buy overage at all. Cursor sells you the tool; Google gives it away and meters it.
| Category | Winner | Margin |
|---|---|---|
| Cost of entry · what you pay on day one | AAntigravity | $0 and generally available, against $20/mo for Cursor Pro — Cursor's free Hobby tier only grants limited Agent requests |
| Agent quality · AA Coding Agent Index, best listed config | AAntigravity | 56.6 for Antigravity SDK on Gemini 3.7 Flash against 47.1 for Cursor CLI on GPT-5.5 — read Aug 31, 2026 |
| Terminal work · Terminal-Bench v2.1 component | AAntigravity | 86.5 against 76.4 — a ten-point lead on the component that shows up most in ordinary shell work |
| Repository Q&A · SWE-Atlas-QnA component | BCursor | 27.7 against 27.2 — Cursor's only win on the index, and half a point is inside the noise |
| Token efficiency · average tokens per index task | BCursor | 4.0M for Cursor CLI against 15.1M for Antigravity — Google's harness spends 3.8x the tokens, on a model that costs a fifth as much |
| Model choice · what you can point the agent at | BCursor | Cursor's sheet runs to dozens of models plus your own API key; Antigravity offers seven and explicitly supports no BYOK |
| Hitting the wall · what happens at the limit | BCursor | Cursor bills on-demand on any paid plan; on free Antigravity there is no overage to buy — you wait for the weekly refresh |
| Quota you can plan around · published numbers vs adjectives | BCursor | Cursor states 3x and 20x of Pro; Google's plans page says meaningful, then high and generous, then the highest and most generous |
| Refresh cadence · how often the tap reopens | BCursor | Google refreshes the free quota weekly and the paid quota every five hours; Cursor's included usage runs monthly with overage always available |
| Editor freedom · where the agent can live | AAntigravity | Antigravity ships extensions for VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Zed and Xcode; Cursor's answer is to become your editor |
| Team and enterprise path · buying for more than one person | BCursor | Cursor sells $40 seats self-serve; Antigravity routes teams through Google Cloud and consumption pricing, with no per-seat list price |
| Who can sign up · account and age rules | BCursor | Antigravity needs a personal Google account, blocks under-18 users and lists 224 eligible territories; Cursor asks for an email |
| Best overall | ·Depends | Antigravity wins the benchmark and the bill; Cursor wins almost everything about control. The tiebreaker is whether a weekly wall is survivable |
CHOOSE A · GOOGLE ANTIGRAVITY
If the bill is the constraint and the ceiling is not.
- Zero — generally available at $0/month with agent-model access, unlimited Tab completions and unlimited Command requests
- Better scores — 56.6 on Artificial Analysis's Coding Agent Index against Cursor CLI's 47.1, and 86.5 against 76.4 on the Terminal-Bench component
- Frontier models on the free tier — Gemini 3.7, 3.6 and 3.5 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-OSS-120b, with the same menu at every consumer tier
- Four surfaces, one entitlement — the 2.0 command center, the CLI, the Python SDK and extensions for five editors all run on the same free account
- Artifacts — plans, walkthroughs, screenshots and browser recordings are first-class review objects, not chat text you have to trust
- A real enterprise route — Google Cloud terms through the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, if you eventually need one
CHOOSE B · CURSOR
If you need the ceiling published and the exits open.
- A number for everything — $0, $20, $60, $200 and $40 a seat all print on one page, and the tiers are stated as multiples of Pro rather than adjectives
- Overage that exists — every paid plan can keep working on on-demand usage; Antigravity's free tier simply stops until the weekly reset
- Your own key — BYOK works on individual plans; Antigravity's docs state flatly that there is no support for bring-your-own-key or bring-your-own-endpoint
- Model breadth — Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, GLM and Kimi on the published sheet, plus in-house Composer 2.5
- Cheapest measured task — Cursor CLI on Composer 2.5 Fast books $0.56 a task on the same index, less than half Antigravity's $1.40
- Self-serve teams — $40 Standard and $120 Premium seats with SSO, admin and Bugbot, without a cloud contract
| Aspect | Antigravity | Cursor |
|---|---|---|
| The tool itselfwhat it costs to start | $0/month Generally available, no subscription. The individual tier lists agent-model access, unlimited Tab completions, unlimited Command requests and basic weekly rate limits A wins | $0 · Hobby No credit card required, but only limited Agent requests and access to Composer — the free tier is an evaluation, not a working plan |
| Entry paid rungthe first upgrade | No plan of its own Antigravity sells nothing. Its paid rungs are Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra — consumer Google One subscriptions that Google prices per country, and Antigravity's own pricing page prints no figure for either | $20/mo · Pro Extended Agent limits, frontier models, MCP, skills, hooks and cloud agents. Annual billing runs about 20% below monthly across the Cursor ladder B wins |
| Power-user rungthe top individual tier | Google AI Ultra The highest quota, refreshed every five hours, the highest weekly limits, and eligibility to spend purchased AI credits once the baseline runs out | $60 Pro+ · $200 Ultra 3x and 20x Pro's Agent limits respectively, with priority access to new features on Ultra B wins |
| What the upgrade buysfeatures or headroom | Rate limits only The model menu is identical from free through Ultra. Paying changes how often the quota refreshes and how large it is — nothing else in the product unlocks | Headroom, plus a little Pro+ and Ultra are stated as multiples of Pro's Agent limits; Ultra also adds priority access to new features and the highest Grok Bot limits |
| Overagewhen the included usage runs out | Paid tiers only AI credits are consumed at standard Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform pricing, and only Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can use them. On the free tier there is nothing to buy — you wait | Any paid plan On-demand usage continues past the included amount and is billed in arrears, so a deadline never turns into a wait B wins |
| Bring your own keyescape hatch to raw API rates | Not supported The plans documentation states there is currently no support for bring-your-own-key or bring-your-own-endpoint, and reaching Antigravity from third-party clients breaks the terms of service | Individual plans BYOK works for individuals. Teams and Enterprise workspaces add a Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million tokens on third-party models B wins |
| Team seatbuying for a group | Via Google Cloud Teams buy under Google Cloud terms through the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform on consumption-based API pricing, included in select Gemini Enterprise subscriptions. No per-seat list price is published | $40/user · Teams Standard seats at $40 and Premium seats at 5x Standard's Agent limits, with SAML/OIDC SSO, pooled admin, Bugbot reviews and usage analytics, all self-serve B wins |
| Measured cost per taskpay-per-token equivalent, AA index | $1.40 / task Antigravity SDK on Gemini 3.7 Flash at high effort, averaged across the three index benchmarks — 15.1M tokens a task at an 87% cache-hit rate A wins | $2.00 / task Cursor CLI on GPT-5.5 at medium effort, its highest-scoring listed config. Composer 2.5 Fast is cheaper at $0.56 a task but scores 38.3 against 47.1 |
| Capability | Antigravity | Cursor |
|---|---|---|
| Price of the client | $0 · generally available | $0 Hobby, $20–$200 individual |
| Reasoning models offered | 7 — Gemini 3.7/3.6/3.5 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.6, GPT-OSS-120b | Dozens on the published sheet — Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, GLM, Kimi, plus Composer 2.5 |
| Frontier models on the free tier | ✓ Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 included at $0 | ~ Hobby gets Composer and limited Agent requests |
| Third-party models on the top tier | ✗ Enterprise drops Claude and GPT-OSS — Gemini only | ✓ Same sheet at every tier |
| Bring your own key | ✗ No BYOK, no custom endpoint | ✓ Individual plans; $0.25/1M Token Rate on Teams |
| Quota refresh, free tier | Weekly | Monthly included usage, then on-demand |
| Quota refresh, paid tiers | Every five hours, until the weekly cap | Monthly pool plus on-demand overage |
| Published limit numbers | ✗ Described as meaningful, generous, highest | ~ Relative multiples: 3x, 20x, 5x of the rung below |
| Separate pools per model family | ✓ Gemini and Claude/GPT metered separately, both shown in-app | ~ Cursor models and Other Models are separate pools |
| Standalone IDE | ✓ Antigravity IDE v2.5.5, plus the 2.0 command center | ✓ The product is the editor — a VS Code fork |
| Terminal agent | ✓ Antigravity CLI v1.1.22, headless mode, sandbox | ✓ Cursor CLI |
| Extensions for other editors | ✓ VS Code, Visual Studio 2026, JetBrains, Zed, Xcode | ✗ Cursor is the editor; there is nothing to install elsewhere |
| Agent SDK | ✓ Python SDK v0.1.15 with personas, policies and hooks | ✗ No published agent SDK |
| Parallel agents | ✓ Command center for multiple local agents, plus subagents | ✓ Cloud agents and background runs |
| Agent teams | ~ Teamwork, in preview | ~ Shared team context on Teams plans |
| Scheduled work | ✓ Scheduled messages on every tier, free included | ✓ Automations on Teams plans |
| Browser control | ✓ Built in, with allowlist/denylist and a separate Chrome profile | ~ Browser tooling via MCP |
| Review artifacts | ✓ Plans, walkthroughs, screenshots, browser recordings | ~ Inline diffs and the chat transcript |
| Image generation in-agent | ✓ Nano Banana 2 for mockups and diagrams | ✗ Not offered |
| MCP, skills, rules, hooks | ✓ All four, plus plugins and sidecars | ✓ MCP, skills and hooks |
| Remote access | ✓ Remote Control drives the agent from a browser | ~ Cloud agents, driven from the editor or web |
| Git worktrees | ✓ Supported in 2.0 | ✓ Supported |
| Code review bot | ✗ No equivalent shipped | ✓ Bugbot, on usage-based billing |
| Desktop platforms | macOS 12+, Windows 10+, Linux (glibc 2.28+) | macOS, Windows, Linux |
| Account type accepted | Personal Google accounts; Workspace accounts hit friction | Any email address |
| Age requirement | 18+, with age verification | No published age gate |
| Geographic availability | 224 countries and territories; some of them cannot buy the paid rungs at all | Sold directly worldwide, resellers not authorised |
| Third-party clients on your quota | ✗ A terms-of-service violation; Google names Claude Code, OpenClaw and opencode | ✓ Other agents install alongside it |
| Sleep behaviour during a run | ✓ Keeps the machine awake while an agent works | ~ Not documented |
| Enterprise controls | Google Cloud project integration, under Cloud terms of service | SCIM, audit logs, repository and model access controls, AI code tracking API |
§ 04 / BENCHMARKS
The numbers, not the spin.
Overall agent quality · AA Coding Agent Index
Terminal work · Terminal-Bench v2.1
Bug fixing · DeepSWE
Repository Q&A · SWE-Atlas-QnA
A · GOOGLE
Antigravity
An agentic platform Google gives away, metered by a clock instead of a card.
Strengths
- Free, and generally available — not a trial and not a preview: $0 with agent-model access, unlimited Tab completions and unlimited Command requests
- Wins the neutral index — 56.6 against Cursor CLI's 47.1, driven by 86.5 on Terminal-Bench v2.1 and 56.0 on DeepSWE
- Four surfaces on one entitlement — command center, CLI, Python SDK and extensions for five editors, all from the same free account
- Claude on Google's dime — Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 sit in the free model picker alongside four Gemini models and GPT-OSS-120b
- Artifacts as review objects — plans, walkthroughs, screenshots and browser recordings, so you audit the work instead of rereading the chat
- Cheaper per task on paper — $1.40 against $2.00 for Cursor's best config, because the tokens land on a model that costs $0.75 per million
Weaknesses
- Weekly refresh on free — paid tiers get a five-hour cycle; free users who exhaust the quota on Monday have a long week ahead
- No overage on free — AI credits exist only for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, so there is nothing to buy your way out with
- Limits stated as adjectives — meaningful, generous, highest, and correlated with how much work the agent did rather than with a prompt count
- No BYOK, no third-party clients — the docs rule out custom keys and endpoints, and using outside tools against your account can end it
- Token-hungry — 15.1M tokens for the average index task against Cursor's 4.0M, which is exactly why the quota has to be a clock
- Eligibility fine print — personal Google accounts only, 18 and over, and a country list that cuts some regions off from the paid rungs entirely
Best for
- Solo developers and students who need frontier agents at zero cost
- Gemini-first teams already inside Google Cloud
- Anyone who wants a terminal agent, an IDE and an SDK without a subscription decision
B · ANYSPHERE
Cursor
The editor you buy, with every number printed and every exit open.
Strengths
- Priced in public — $0, $20, $60, $200 and $40 a seat on one page, with tiers expressed as multiples of Pro rather than adjectives
- Overage always available — any paid plan continues on on-demand usage billed in arrears, so the work never simply stops
- Model breadth — Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, GLM and Kimi on the published sheet, plus the in-house Composer 2.5
- Cheapest measured task on the index — Composer 2.5 Fast books $0.56 a task, well under Antigravity's $1.40
- Your own key — BYOK on individual plans, with a stated $0.25 per million Token Rate once you are on Teams or Enterprise
- Self-serve teams — SSO, admin, Bugbot code review and usage analytics without a cloud contract or a sales call
Weaknesses
- Nothing is free — Hobby grants only limited Agent requests, so real work starts at $20
- Loses the index — 47.1 at its best listed config against 56.6, and its own Composer 2.5 lands at 38.3
- Limits are relative — every tier is described against Pro, and Pro's own absolute size is never published
- Two metered pools — Cursor's own models and Other Models bill differently, which makes forecasting a two-variable problem
- One surface — the agent lives in the editor and its CLI; there is no SDK, and no extension for the editor you already use
Best for
- Teams that need a predictable, invoiceable bill
- Developers who switch models constantly or run their own API keys
- Anyone whose deadlines cannot survive a rate limit that lasts until next week
01
Learning to build, with no budget
You are a student or a career-switcher writing side projects at night. A $20 subscription is a real decision; a rate limit is an inconvenience.
Reasoning: Antigravity gives you Claude Opus 4.6, four Gemini models and a terminal agent for nothing, and it outscores Cursor's paid CLI on the neutral index. The weekly refresh is the price, and for evening work it rarely binds. Cursor's Hobby tier cannot compete here, because limited Agent requests is not a working allowance.
Picked
Antigravity
Runner-up: Cursor Pro at $20/mo, once the weekly wall starts landing mid-week
02
Shipping on a deadline you did not set
A release date is fixed, and you will be running agents hard for three days straight.
Reasoning: This is the case Antigravity's free tier is worst at: the quota refreshes weekly and there is no overage to buy. Cursor Pro or Pro+ keeps working on on-demand usage billed in arrears — you can spend your way through a crunch, which is exactly what a deadline needs. Pay the $20 and treat the overage as insurance.
Picked
Cursor
Runner-up: Antigravity on a Google AI plan, which at least restores the five-hour refresh
03
Terminal-heavy infrastructure work
Most of your day is shell: migrations, build systems, container debugging, log spelunking.
Reasoning: Terminal-Bench v2.1 is the component where the two harnesses separate most — 86.5 for Antigravity against 76.4 for Cursor CLI's best config. The Antigravity CLI also ships headless mode, a sandbox and per-command permissions. If your work is mostly shell, the free tool is the better tool, not merely the cheaper one.
Picked
Antigravity
Runner-up: Cursor CLI on GPT-5.5, if you want the agent inside an editor you already pay for
04
You switch models several times a day
You route cheap tasks to a small model, hard ones to a frontier model, and you keep your own API keys for anything sensitive.
Reasoning: Antigravity offers seven models and no way to bring your own — the docs rule out custom keys and custom endpoints, and using another client against your Antigravity account violates the terms. Cursor's sheet is far wider and BYOK works on individual plans. Here the $20 buys optionality, not capacity.
Picked
Cursor
Runner-up: Antigravity for the Gemini half of the work, run separately
05
Rolling out to a team of twelve
You need seats, SSO, some admin visibility and a bill your finance team recognises.
Reasoning: Cursor sells this configuration on a web page: $40 Standard seats, Premium seats at 5x the agent limits, SAML/OIDC SSO, usage analytics, pooled admin. Antigravity's team path runs through Google Cloud and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform on consumption pricing, with no per-seat list price — workable if you already buy Cloud, a procurement project if you do not.
Picked
Cursor
Runner-up: Antigravity through Gemini Enterprise, if your org is already a Google Cloud customer
06
You want the agent inside the editor you already use
Your team runs JetBrains, or Zed, or plain VS Code, and nobody wants to migrate editors for an AI feature.
Reasoning: Antigravity ships official extensions for VS Code, Visual Studio 2026, JetBrains, Zed and Xcode, all on the free entitlement. Cursor's answer to this question is to become your editor. If switching editors is the blocker, only one of these two products has an answer — and it costs nothing.
Picked
Antigravity
Runner-up: Cline or a similar extension, if you want a paid agent inside your current editor
Frequently asked.
Common questions about this comparison, with sources where they matter.
Q · 01 Is Google Antigravity really free, or is this a preview that will start charging? +
It is free and generally available — Google's pricing page lists the individual tier at $0 per month with agent-model access, unlimited Tab completions, unlimited Command requests and basic weekly rate limits. There is no paid Antigravity plan at all: the two upgrade rungs on that page are Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra, which are consumer Google One subscriptions, and the third is an organisation plan bought through Google Cloud. What those rungs buy is rate limits, not features — the model menu is identical at every consumer tier.
Q · 02 Which is actually better at coding? +
On the only neutral scoreboard that carries both, Antigravity. Artificial Analysis's Coding Agent Index — DeepSWE, SWE-Atlas-QnA and Terminal-Bench v2.1 at equal weight — puts the Antigravity SDK on Gemini 3.7 Flash at 56.6 and Cursor CLI on GPT-5.5 at 47.1, each side's best listed configuration as of August 31, 2026. The gap comes from terminal work (86.5 against 76.4) and bug fixing (56.0 against 37.2); Cursor edges the repository-Q&A component by half a point, which is a tie in practice. One caveat worth keeping: that index scores the harnesses — the SDK and the CLI — not the graphical editors most people actually open.
Q · 03 What happens when I hit Antigravity's limit? +
You stop until the quota refreshes, and how long that takes depends on what you pay. Without a Google AI plan the quota refreshes weekly. On Google AI Pro it refreshes every five hours until the weekly cap is reached, and Ultra gets the same cadence with the highest ceiling. Only Pro and Ultra subscribers can spend AI credits for overage, charged at standard Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform consumption pricing and governed by an AI Credit Overages setting you can leave switched off. Free users have no overage to buy at all. Cursor's model is the opposite: every paid plan continues on on-demand usage billed in arrears.
Q · 04 Can I run Antigravity inside Cursor? +
Not officially. Google ships extensions for VS Code, Visual Studio 2026, JetBrains, Zed and Xcode — Cursor, despite being a VS Code fork, is not on that list, and the VS Code build is distributed through the Microsoft Marketplace, which Cursor does not use by default. Google is also explicit that reaching Antigravity through third-party software violates its terms of service and can cost you the account; its FAQ names Claude Code, OpenClaw and opencode specifically, and points you at a Vertex or AI Studio API key instead. If you want an agent inside Cursor, use one built for that, such as Cline.
Q · 05 Why would Google give away a tool that beats a $20 product? +
Because the tokens are the product. The same index run shows Antigravity averaging 15.1 million tokens a task against Cursor CLI's 4.0 million — 3.8 times as many — but spending them on Gemini 3.7 Flash at $0.75 per million input, so the pay-per-token equivalent still lands at $1.40 a task against Cursor's $2.00. Google is buying inference at cost to seed an agent platform; Anysphere has to resell someone else's. That is also why the free tier is metered by a clock rather than a card — the rate limit is the price.
Q · 06 Which models can I use on each? +
Antigravity offers seven reasoning models, and the same menu at every consumer tier: Gemini 3.7 Flash, 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-OSS-120b, plus Nano Banana 2 for images. There is an odd inversion at the top: the Enterprise column drops Claude and GPT-OSS, leaving Gemini only. Cursor's published sheet is far wider — Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, GLM and Kimi families alongside its own Composer 2.5 — and individual plans accept your own API key, which Antigravity does not support at any tier.
Q · 07 Can my team buy Antigravity? +
Only through Google Cloud. Individual accounts run on terms derived from Google's consumer terms of service; teams buy under Google Cloud terms through the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, on consumption-based API pricing, and it is included in select Gemini Enterprise app subscriptions that are still rolling out. There is no per-seat list price and, per Google's own documentation, no organisational tier by contract outside that route. Cursor sells the same shape of thing self-serve at $40 a seat, with Premium seats at 5x the agent limits, SAML/OIDC SSO and audit trails — see Cursor vs Claude Code for how that seat compares against the other coding subscriptions.
Q · 08 Is there anyone who cannot use Antigravity at all? +
Yes, and the rules are unusually specific. Antigravity requires a personal Google account — Google's FAQ suggests a gmail.com address when a Workspace account will not authenticate — and it is unavailable to under-18 users, with age verification if you are wrongly flagged. It lists 224 eligible countries and territories, and a further list of regions where Google One AI plans are not sold at all, which means places such as Kosovo, Montenegro and the Isle of Man get the free tier with no way to raise its limits. Cursor sells directly worldwide and warns that no reseller is authorised.