CursorvsTheia IDE
Generated from the two spec rows. Green marks the better value where a spec has a clear direction. Everything else is just different.
Cursor
Anysphere · AI-native IDE
#12MCP
Panel
6.83 spec wins
- Reliability
- 7.0
- Usefulness
- 7.7
- Cost
- 5.5
- Longevity
- 6.8
“Twenty dollars a month, then 3x, then 20x, and the page never says 20x of what.”
Theia IDE
Eclipse Foundation · AI-native IDE
#10OSSMCP
Panel
7.33 spec wins
- Reliability
- 6.7
- Usefulness
- 6.3
- Cost
- 8.5
- Longevity
- 7.5
“It includes a PR Reviewer agent inside the editor, so you can now be rejected before you have even pushed.”
Spec by spec
| Spec | Cursor | Theia IDE |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| Category | AI-native IDE | AI-native IDE |
| Runs | local, cloud | local, cloud |
| Platforms | macos, linux, windows | macos, linux, windows, web |
| Context window | 200k default, up to 1M tokens on select models | not documented |
| Protocols | ||
| MCP client | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | No | No |
| Capabilities | ||
| Runs terminal commands | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-file edits | Yes | Yes |
| Git operations | Yes | YesThrough the GitHub and PR Reviewer chat agents and the IDE's built-in Git support. |
| Browser control | Yes | No |
| Sandboxed execution | Yes | No |
| Multi-agent orchestration | Yes | YesTheia ships several named chat agents plus an Orchestrator agent that routes a request to the right one. |
| Headless / CI mode | Yes | No |
| Models | ||
| Backbone | Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, Composer, Kimi, GLM | any |
| Bring your own model | YesYour own keys reach the vendors' own models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) plus your own Azure OpenAI deployment or AWS Bedrock account; Tab completion always stays on Cursor's models. | Yes |
| Local models | NoCustom API keys are limited to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure OpenAI and AWS Bedrock, with no documented base URL override, so Ollama, LM Studio or a self-hosted endpoint cannot be pointed at. | YesOllama, llamafile and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint such as vLLM are documented LLM providers. |
| Cost | ||
| Pricing model | mixed | byok |
| Starts at | $20/mo | $0/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Bring your own key | Yes | Yes |
| Openness | ||
| Open source | No | Yes |
| License | proprietary | EPL-2.0 |
| GitHub stars | n/a | 21,709 |
Which one would each critic pick
| Critic | Cursor | Theia IDE | Pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Juez | — | — | not enough reviews |
| El Amigo | 7.8 | 7.0 | Cursor — The best editor experience today, with a subscription that turns into a meter the moment you push the agent hard. |
| El Crítico | 6.5 | 6.8 | Theia IDE — It runs VS Code extensions from Open VSX rather than the Microsoft marketplace, so an extension your team depends on may simply not be there. |
| El Profesor | 6.0 | 7.5 | Theia IDE — An Orchestrator agent routes a request to a specialised one, which is explicit dispatch rather than a single prompt pretending to be several. |
| La Inversora | 8.3 | 7.0 | Cursor — Real revenue, real pricing power, an in-house model, and a dependency on the labs it competes with for every frontier request. |
| La Jefa | 7.5 | 6.8 | Cursor — Teams at $40 per user with SSO, but SCIM, audit logs and auto-run controls sit behind a custom Enterprise quote. |
| El Hacker | 4.5 | 8.5 | Theia IDE — EPL-2.0, every prompt template is editable by me, and Ollama or llamafile are documented providers, so the whole editor runs with nothing leaving the machine. |
Picks are derived from each critic's own scores. Humans vote on matchups on the duels page.