The best alternatives to GitHub Copilot

Cursor 4/5 · Free + from $20

A quiet week, and today the official site's JSON-LD confirms the same price again: Hobby free, Pro at $20. No dated fact this week clears the bar to move any axis: the removal of dollar-cost figures from the usage page still has not been reverted (the forum thread runs through 9 August with no new official reply), the SpaceX purchase remains unclosed with no public news, and no second vulnerability has surfaced since July's. There were three short incidents on the official status page between 5 and 7 August, all resolved the same day, which do not meet the bar for a sustained outage.

Where it wins: Composer 2.5 has become the daily driver for much of the community, described as fast and cheap for 80% of tasks Where it slips: Vulnerability CVE-2026-63093 was published in July 2026 through full disclosure after the December 2025 private report went unanswered, and the thread telling the story passed 450 points

Full comparison: GitHub Copilot vs Cursor

Claude Code 4/5 · From $17

A week of big announcements and an unresolved controversy. On 7 August Anthropic confirmed that from 14 August auto mode becomes the default permission setting on Pro, Max and Team plans, backed by its own study, 89% of simulated dangerous actions blocked against 13.6% caught by human review. The same week brought cross-session messaging and self-hosted environments. But the problem already visible last week, safety filters blocking legitimate coding work, is still alive even in the newest release, and one user automated the reporting and opened 49 issues in a single day. The price has not moved, $17 a month paying the year up front and $20 a month on its own.

Where it wins: Understands whole codebases and follows project patterns: refactors, tests and multi-step features without constant supervision, now with Opus 5 by default and a one million token context Where it slips: Safety filters still block legitimate coding work and it remains unresolved: even in the newest release, 2.1.226, there are reports dated this week, and one user automated the reporting with their own tool and opened 49 issues in a single day with the same pattern. Anthropic offers a cyber verification programme as an appeals route, but the block itself keeps happening

OpenAI Codex 4/5 · Free + from $8

The official pricing page confirms today the same figures as always: Free at $0, Go at $8. Release pace was high this week: version 0.147.0 on 7 August adds Cursor skill imports and an Agent Plugins catalogue, plus redacting secrets and tokens from the on-screen history, and 0.146.1 on 5 August applies stricter automatic reviews for cyber-capable models. Neither fixes what the sensitive-files exclusion request is asking for, which remains administratively closed since June with a duplicate request still open. July's case of a private repository pushed without permission to OpenAI infrastructure remains the only documented one, with no second occurrence this week.

Where it wins: Entry stays cheap, confirmed today on the official site: a Free plan at $0 a month and a Go at $8 with Codex access, without having to go through the $20 Plus tier Where it slips: The issue asking to exclude sensitive files was closed administratively on 29 June 2026 without the repository showing any new feature or changelog entry to back it up, and a duplicate request remains open asking for the same thing. The on-screen secret redaction that shipped on 7 August hides the display, it does not stop the model from reading the file