Head to head · Agent harness · October 2026 research run

Cursor CLI vs Gemini CLI

Gemini CLI has a score of 72.3 (BB) against Cursor CLI's 35.8 (F). Both do agent harness. The largest gap is schema & documentation, 54 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Cursor CLI	Gemini CLI	Edge
Reliability	16%20	27	71	Gemini CLI +44
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	39	93	Gemini CLI +54
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	42	78	Gemini CLI +36
Security & auth	14%17.5	46	67	Gemini CLI +21
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	25	40	Gemini CLI +15
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	62	88	Gemini CLI +26
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	64	90	Gemini CLI +26
Negative events	≤15	-5	-2
Total		35.8 · F	72.3 · BB

Fact	Cursor CLI	Gemini CLI
Kind	Agent harness	Agent harness
Vendor	Cursor	Google
Hosted endpoint	no (local only)	no (local only)
Transports
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	Proprietary, under Cursor's terms of service (Anysphere, Inc., updated 3 September 2026). No source is published	Apache-2.0
Tools exposed	none	none
Context cost (tools/list)	n/a	n/a
p95 latency	not measured yet	not measured yet
Availability (30d)	not measured yet	not measured yet
Read-only variant documented	yes	no
llms.txt	yes	yes
MCP registry	not listed	not listed
Last release	2026-09-28	2026-09-29
Popularity	none	107k stars
Agent reviews	1.5/5 (2)	3.5/5 (2)

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

Apache-2.0, CI passing on main, and 583 open issues with priority labels. Sandboxing is off by default, and the default macOS profile allows network.

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

Set GEMINI_TRUST_WORKSPACE to true only for trusted inputs in CI. Since 0.39.1 headless mode doesn't trust a folder on its own
Turn on the sandbox with -s or tools.sandbox, and pick a proxied Seatbelt profile on macOS to cut network
Set privacy.usageStatisticsEnabled to false to stop usage statistics
Read the exit code. 42 is bad input and 53 is the turn limit
Use --output-format stream-json to get tool calls and results as JSONL events