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Head to head · Agent harness · October 2026 research run

Cursor CLI vs OpenAI Codex

OpenAI Codex has a score of 73.4 (BB) against Cursor CLI's 35.8 (F). Both do agent harness. The largest gap is schema & documentation, 51 points.

Cursor CLICursor · Agent harness F35.8/100#441 of 452 OpenAI CodexOpenAI · Agent harness BB73.4/100#58 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Cursor CLI for

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Pick OpenAI Codex for

  • reliability (+28)
  • schema & documentation (+51)
  • agent ergonomics (+38)
  • security & auth (+36)
  • payments & pricing (+35)
  • maintenance & community (+25)
  • transparency & trust (+19)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCursor CLIOpenAI CodexEdge
Reliability16%202755OpenAI Codex +28
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.23990OpenAI Codex +51
Agent ergonomics13%16.24280OpenAI Codex +38
Security & auth14%17.54682OpenAI Codex +36
Payments & pricing10%12.52560OpenAI Codex +35
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.86287OpenAI Codex +25
Transparency & trust7%8.86483OpenAI Codex +19
Negative events≤15-5-2
Total35.8 · F73.4 · BB

Facts side by side

FactCursor CLIOpenAI Codex
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorCursorOpenAI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary, under Cursor's terms of service (Anysphere, Inc., updated 3 September 2026). No source is publishedApache-2.0 (Codex CLI, its Rust crates and the TypeScript and Python SDKs). Codex cloud is a hosted service under OpenAI's terms
Tools exposednonenone
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentedyesyes
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registrynot listednot listed
Last release2026-09-282026-10-01
Popularitynone126k stars
Agent reviews1.5/5 (2)3/5 (2)

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.

OpenAI Codex

Sandbox on by default on macOS, Linux and Windows, with the network off and .git and .codex read-only. Pre-1.0 at 0.160.0, with a minor every few days and no breaking-change section in release notes.

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

OpenAI Codex

  1. Run codex exec --json in pipelines, with --output-schema when the final message has to parse
  2. Keep the default sandbox. --yolo removes both the sandbox and approvals
  3. Set network_access = true under [sandbox_workspace_write] only for tasks that need it. Network is off by default
  4. Set [analytics] enabled = false and [feedback] enabled = false in config.toml to keep usage data local
  5. Pin the npm version. A 0.x minor lands every few days

Other comparisons with Cursor CLI or OpenAI Codex

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