Cursor vs Trae

Both start at $20/mo, and Trae drops to $16.7/mo billed annually. What a beginner gets for that price is clearer with Trae: its Pro plan includes $20/month of Dollar Usage, while Cursor does not publish its entry-tier allowance. That predictability matters most for a new developer's bill. Cursor answers with checkpoints and rollback, which Trae does not offer, so undoing an agent's mess is easier in Cursor. The free plans are similar in spirit, with Cursor offering limited Agent requests and Composer and Trae a limited monthly Dollar Usage allowance at $0. Both run as a desktop IDE.

For a security review, Cursor publishes the commitments buyers ask for. It states that with Privacy Mode on, code is not used for training, while Trae does not publish a comparable no-training commitment for company code. Both offer a self-hostedself-host - Run the software on your own servers instead of the vendor’s cloud. or VPC deployment and a zero data retention option, and both list SOC 2, although Trae's SOC 2 and retention claims are vendor-stated. Cursor also offers SAML/OIDC SSO from its Teams plan at $40/user/mo, plus admin audit logs, and Trae publishes neither.

Both free plans are loosely capped. Cursor's Hobby plan gives limited Agent requests and Composer access, while Trae's $0 plan gives a limited monthly allowance of Dollar Usage, a budget that is easier to reason about. Both let you bring your own API key, so neither strands you once the free allowance runs out. Moving up costs $20/mo with either, but Trae offers $16.7/mo on annual billing, and its Pro plan spells out $20/month of included Dollar Usage. Neither publishes local model support. Trae's clearer free and entry allowance gives it a narrow edge.

This use case turns on running models on your own machine, and neither Cursor nor Trae publishes local model support, a list of supported model providers, or an open license. Both support bringing your own API key, which helps with hosted providers but is not the same as offline, local inference. With the deciding facts missing on both sides, and both matching on the one related attribute, neither can be recommended for local models.

Teams that want to read or fork the agent itself need a published license, and neither Cursor nor Trae publishes one, nor a list of supported model providers, local model support or GitHub stars. Instead, both sell hosted plans starting at $20/mo and an Enterprise plan through sales. Both list a self-hostedself-host - Run the software on your own servers instead of the vendor’s cloud. or VPC deployment, but that is a commercial deployment option, not source code you can fork. With the deciding facts missing on both sides, neither earns the pick.

For shell-first developers, where the agent runs matters most. Cursor lists twelve surfaces, starting with its desktop IDE and an Agents window, while Trae lists five, starting with its TraeCode desktop IDE in IDE and SOLO modes. Beyond that they match closely: both run terminal commands, offer background or cloud agents and support MCP. For project guidance, Cursor reads AGENTS.md and.cursor/rules files, while Trae uses memory files such as a global user profile. Cursor's broader reach gives it a narrow edge.

For developers staying in a VS Code-style editor, Cursor is its own editor built as a VS Code fork, while Trae does not publish which editors it supports. Both make autonomous multi-file edits and both index your codebase. Rollback is what separates them: Cursor offers checkpoints and Trae does not, so undoing a bad agent run is harder in Trae. Trae does publish $20/month of included Dollar Usage on Pro, which Cursor does not, but that matters less here than editor fit and an easy undo.