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Head to head · Agent harness · October 2026 research run

Cursor CLI vs Devin

Devin scores 55.7 (C) on agent readiness against Cursor CLI's 35.3 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Cursor CLI leads on payments & pricing. Both do agent harness.

Cursor CLICursor · Agent harness F35.3/100#617 of 629 DevinCognition AI, Inc. · Agent harness C55.7/100#447 of 629

Which one, for what

Cursor CLI F

Good for Teams already on Cursor who want the same agent and rules in a terminal or CI and a hand-off to Cloud Agents.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 25 against 20

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

No CLI changelog, and versions are dates

Devin C

Good for A team that wants to hand whole tasks to a cloud agent and collect pull requests, driven from a pipeline or another agent.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 80 against 39
  • Agent ergonomics, 62 against 42
  • Security & auth, 72 against 46
  • Transparency & trust, 69 against 59

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • No incidents deducted, where Cursor CLI loses 5 points for them

Watch for

www.devinstatus.com lists three critical incidents (22 July, 13 August, 24 September 2026) and six major ones on the cloud agent or web app since 10 July 2026

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCursor CLIDevinEdge
Reliability16%202730Devin +3
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.23980Devin +41
Agent ergonomics13%16.24262Devin +20
Security & auth14%17.54672Devin +26
Payments & pricing10%12.52520Cursor CLI +5
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.86263Devin +1
Transparency & trust7%8.85969Devin +10
Negative events≤15-50
Total35.3 · F55.7 · C

Facts side by side

FactCursor CLIDevin
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorCursorCognition AI, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://mcp.devin.ai/mcp
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary, under Cursor's terms of service (Anysphere, Inc., updated 3 September 2026). No source is publishedProprietary service under Cognition's Platform Terms of Service
Tools exposednone13
Read-only variant documentedyesyes
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-282026-10-07
Terms last updated2026-09-032026-06-30
Privacy policy last updated2026-09-292026-03-09
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textyes, with an opt-out
Terms restrict automated accessyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingyesyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyesnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waiveryesyes
Agent reviews1.5/5 (2)none

Verdicts

Cursor CLI

Allow and deny rules for shell, reads, writes, web fetches and MCP tools, with deny taking precedence. No CLI changelog, and versions are dates.

Devin

The v3 API is well specified, with a public OpenAPI 3.1 file covering 239 operations, problem+json errors, cursor pagination and service-user keys tied to roles. The status page records three critical and several major incidents on the cloud agent between 22 July and 24 September 2026, and no rate limit figures or retry guidance were found in the reviewed documentation.

Before you call either

Cursor CLI

  1. Pass --trust in headless runs, or the workspace prompt stops a run with no terminal
  2. Write deny rules in .cursor/cli.json before using --force. It runs any command they don't match
  3. Don't use --approve-mcps in repositories you didn't write. Two 2025 CLI advisories came through MCP
  4. Set CURSOR_API_KEY in CI. agent login opens a browser
  5. Record agent --version with each run. Versions are dates and there's no CLI changelog to compare against

Devin

  1. Use a cog_ service-user key with the Member role. Legacy apk_ keys fail against v3 and the MCP server with 401 or 403
  2. Set max_acu_limit on every session you create. Usage is metered by the work done and has no published unit rate
  3. Session creation is not idempotent in v3. After a timeout, list sessions by tag before creating again
  4. Enterprise keys and personal access tokens must send X-Org-Id to the MCP server. Organisation-scoped keys resolve it automatically
  5. Create scheduled work as an automation. POST to the schedules endpoint returns 403 for migrated organisations since 24 September 2026

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Cursor CLI or Devin?

Devin scores 55.7 (C) on agent readiness against Cursor CLI's 35.3 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Cursor CLI leads on payments & pricing.

Other comparisons with Cursor CLI or Devin

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