Cursor vs. Replit: How They Stack Up

Cursor vs. Replit are both attempting to get everyone into the vibe coding field, but they might as well be from different planets. Cursor is what you get when you give developers who want to move at light speed steroids and AI superpowers to VS Code. Replit is what happens when someone asks, “What if anyone could build and deploy apps from their browser

Cursor’s for those who say, “I’m a developer, and I love being a developer, but I also love feeling like I have superpowers.” You’re still coding, forming decisions, and designing things. The only difference being now AI is whispering great ideas in your ear and taking care of the boring stuff.

Replit is more like, “I had an idea on the throne, and now it’s a web app that is live.” What does “local development” mean? You don’t have to worry about setting things up, configuring them, or the environment. You just make things, in your web browser, while eating cereal.

Cursor vs. Replit Features

Magic Tricks with Cursor

Pressing tab will finish your code. But here’s the best part: if that edit means something else needs to be changed, you can keep hitting tab, and it will make all the changes that need to be in your whole project. 

You can give Cursor your documentation, Git history, error logs, structures, and pretty much anything else, and it will build an almost scary understanding of what your project is trying to do. When you ask it to refactor something, it doesn’t just change that one function, it looks at every file that touches that code and updates them all in a way that makes sense.

Need GPT-4 for this job? Is that Claude? Gemini, because you want to try something new? Cursor lets you choose which AI you want to use, so you’re not stuck with the way one company does things.

The Wizardry of Replit

Node setup, configuring webpack, fighting dependency issues, and then crying over CORS errors used to be the norm, but not with Replit. Simply pick a template or just start typing, and everything is already set up. 

WebContainers powers this, which I still don’t fully understand, so now you can run real Node.js in your browser. npm install really does work. Backend servers really do run. It isn’t fake or copied; it’s real, but it shouldn’t be able to happen where it is.

Tell the Replit agent what you want and watch as it builds a whole app from front to back, with authentication and everything else you need. It has autonomous agent platform which builds that don’t need much supervision. It opens a browser, tests its own work, and you can adjust the overall autonomy it has. It’s like having an intern who actually gets things done.

Numerous people work on projects at the same time, and live cursors show where each person is working. This is what teachers use to help students right away. Teams use it for pair programming without any lag when sharing screens. It works together in a way that seems impossible to be smooth. 

Are you done building? Press deploy. Get a link. Send it out to the web.

Cursor is like a full buffet-style platform. You get all of the newest models, like OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s. Choose what works best for what you’re making or mix and match to get the most out of it.

Replit uses OpenAI GPT-4 and Anthropic Claude, which are LLMs, in conjunction with its own tools. When you use Replit, you’re not really thinking about models. You are not asking yourself, “Which LLM should I use for this API call?”

Cursor vs. Replit: The Money Aspect

Cursor

$20 a month. That’s all, and you’re able to make use of all the AI you want, and there is no tracking of how much you use it. You don’t have to worry about whether you can afford one more question. You pay, you get everything, and that’s it.

Replit

The Core plan costs $20 a month (for a year) or $25 a month (for a month), comes with $25 in credits, and the agent charges $0.25 per checkpoint. But they switched to effort-based pricing, which means that simple tasks cost less than $0.25 while complicated ones could cost a lot more, maybe even several dollars. There are also compute units, database costs, and deployment costs.

One user reportedly said, “I used up all my Teams credits in the first month.” It’s hard to plan a trip with Replit’s prices because you don’t know how much gas costs at each station, and sometimes the road itself charges you more.

Cursor vs. Replit: What Each One Is Good At

Cursor Can’t Be Beat When

You’re making something important: production apps with tests, monitoring, a good framework, and script that will be kept up to date for years. Cursor helps you work faster without making you sloppy.

You already have a codebase: Do you have 50,000 lines of old code that needs to be cleaned up? Cursor can get around that mess. It knows how everything fits together, how to deal with technical debt, and how to handle complicated project structures.

You want help, not someone to hold your hand. You are in charge of making important decisions, which means you’re looking over the code and remain in charge. Cursor is not a replacement for you, it’s a tool.

Do you already use Git, Docker, your own pipeline, and certain testing frameworks? Cursor doesn’t ask you to change any of that. It just makes you better at what you’re already doing.

Replit Is Your Hero When

You need something to work right away: Users praise Replit for its ability to support quick changes and rapid prototyping. One user said it lets them “quickly deploy their environment and try out new features, making sure they work in production.” Need a demo for a meeting tomorrow? Replit is here for you.

Setup makes you want to scream: No managers of versions. No, “just let me fix my PATH real quick,” that takes three hours. Replit’s AI can turn natural language into code, which makes the platform very easy to use and makes it easier for new users to get started.

You’re either teaching or learning: With a link, teachers can share whole projects. Students can see each other’s code in real time. There is almost no barrier to “Let’s just write some code.”

You don’t know much about technology, but you have ideas: One user said, “As a non-technical founder, I’ve been able to show and share my ideas and make apps on the spot for people that I wouldn’t have been able to do without it.” That’s really crazy.

You just want to try things out: Curious about what Next.js is like? Want to give Svelte a shot at making something? Want to know more about WebSockets? Just open a new Repl and play around. No promise, no ceremony to set things up.

Cursor vs. Replit Reality Checks

Cursor’s Reality

You still have to write code. Cursor helps good developers become great. It doesn’t magically change people who aren’t developers into developers. You’re going to have a hard time if you can’t read and understand the code it makes.

Cursor will sometimes make code that is 100% wrong. It doesn’t say, “I don’t know about this.” It just confidently makes broken code, and you have to find it.

You need to let Cursor know what’s important. What is that API documentation? Put it in by hand. Those choices about design from Slack? Add them by hand. It doesn’t happen automatically.

Want to write code on an iPad? On a computer at the library that isn’t yours? Bad luck. You need to have Cursor installed and set up on your computer. There isn’t an “open a browser tab” escape hatch.

Uncomfortable Truths About Replit

Users say that “Replit is a great way to build software, at least for an MVP or prototype,” but they also say that it can be hard to use for complicated apps that need advanced state management and business logic. Apps that do CRUD? Great. SaaS platform with complicated workflows? It’s going to have a hard time.

Many users say that “debugging what seems like a simple feature takes days instead of minutes” and that “it’s especially frustrating that Replit is writing the code in the first place.” When the AI gets confused, you need real developer skills to fix the problem.

People say that the Agent mode “gets confused, and there have been times when it just gets stuck in a loop.” It’s amazing when it works. If it doesn’t work, you’ll have to debug AI-generated code that you didn’t write.

With that user who spent a year’s worth of credits in a month, nothing stops your creative flow like watching credits drain while you’re trying to make something.

You live in their world, where everything is on Replit’s servers. Your code, your databases, and your environment. Want to move to your own infrastructure later? That’s a whole job. You’re part of their ecosystem, and it’s not easy to leave.

The Cursor vs. Replit Lesson

In a way, they’re not really competitors:

Cursor is a tool for developers who make software that will be used in the real world. The whole professional stack: real applications with real users, good architecture, tests, CI/CD, and monitoring. It keeps you in charge and makes you incredibly productive.

Replit is for people who need to show that something works without having to go through the trouble of traditional development. MVPs that try out ideas. Funding for prototypes. Tools that work inside the company to fix problems. Demos that convince stakeholders. People from all over the world are making amazing things on Replit, from real estate agents in the US to Japanese social media stars to product managers at big companies—often using prompt-to-app functionality to turn ideas into working demos in minutes.

Choosing one isn’t the smart thing to do. It’s using both in a smart way:

At the start of the week, use Replit to make sure the idea works.

Cursor will build the production version for the rest of the week.