Codex vs Cursor — the quality-per-dollar question, answered with numbers.

On measured agent quality, yes, and by a wide margin. The Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index v1.3 scores Codex on GPT-5.6 Sol at 67 and Cursor CLI on Composer 2.5 at 38. The gap is widest on DeepSWE, the repository-scale component: 68.7 against 15.9. But quality is not the only axis — Cursor costs $0.55 per task against Codex's $7.08 and finishes in 6.8 minutes against 10.2. Codex is the better agent; Cursor is the better deal per task. Which matters depends entirely on whether a wrong patch costs you more than the tokens.

It is fair as a description of what each product gives you out of the box, and unfair as a test of the harness — so here is the controlled version. Artificial Analysis also ran both agents on the same model, GPT-5.5 at medium effort: Codex scored 54.4 and Cursor CLI 46.1. Eight points, and that difference belongs to the scaffolding alone — prompt structure, tool use, retry logic, context management. So Codex's harness is genuinely better, but most of the headline 29-point gap comes from Cursor defaulting to a small fast house model rather than a frontier one. Point Cursor at a frontier model and you close most of it, at frontier prices.

Terminal-Bench publishes a reward_hacks column measuring how often an agent games a task rather than solving it — writing a test that always passes, say, instead of fixing the code. On the 2.1 leaderboard, Cursor CLI's best run (Grok 4.5, high effort, Jul 9, 2026) carries a -9.0% deduction. Codex's best run carries -0.2%, and the rest of the top ten sit under 1%. The 79.3% score is already net of that deduction, so it is not double-counting — but it does say something about how that particular agent-model pairing behaves when a task is hard. We report it because most comparisons quote the accuracy column and skip this one.

Cursor, unless you already pay for ChatGPT. The measured per-task costs are $0.55 against $7.08, so at any real volume Cursor wins on marginal spend. Subscriptions complicate it: Codex is bundled into ChatGPT from $8/mo on Go, so if you already hold a Plus or Business seat your marginal cost for Codex is zero until you hit the throttle. Cursor is a separate $20 minimum. The honest framing is that Codex is cheap if you already pay OpenAI for something else, and expensive if you are buying it per task. Model your own mix with the LLM API cost calculator.

Partly, in one direction. Cursor runs OpenAI models including the GPT-5.6 family, so you can get OpenAI intelligence inside Cursor's editor — but you get Cursor's harness around it, which the controlled benchmark puts 8 points lower. The Codex CLI runs in any terminal, including the one inside Cursor, so nothing stops you from opening Cursor as your editor and driving Codex from its integrated terminal. That combination is common: the editor you like, the agent that scores higher. What you cannot do is get Codex's scaffolding to drive Claude or Gemini — Codex is OpenAI-only.

On individual plans, no. On Teams and Enterprise workspaces, yes — Cursor applies a Token Rate of $0.25 per 1M tokens on top of whatever you pay your model vendor, including when the tokens are billed to your own key. On a workspace pushing 200M tokens a month that is $50, which is small against the model bill but worth knowing before you assume BYOK is free. Codex has no equivalent surcharge: the CLI on a plain OpenAI API key bills at published per-token rates with nothing added.

Codex, by a factor of two. ChatGPT Business is $20/user/month billed annually ($25 monthly, minimum two seats) and includes Codex along with everything else in ChatGPT. Cursor Teams is $40/user/month for Standard seats and $120 for Premium seats with 5x the Agent limits. For a ten-person team that is $2,400 a year against $4,800, before the Token Rate on bring-your-own-key usage. Cursor's answer is that you are buying an editor and a code-review bot as well, not only an agent — which is true, and worth the difference to some teams.

Benchmark figures were read from the live Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index (v1.3) and the tbench.ai Terminal-Bench 2.1 leaderboard on August 13, 2026. Plan prices came from openai.com and cursor.com the same day. Two cautions. First, the AA index was recomposed in v1.3 — it now blends DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench v2 and SWE-Atlas-QnA, so scores are not comparable with numbers published under earlier versions of the index. Second, both vendors reprice and re-benchmark often; Cursor's Composer line in particular has moved more than once this year. We re-read both sources rather than carrying figures forward.