Cursor vs Kiro

As of Nov 3, 2026 (CT), Cursor lists Free, Plus at $8 a month, Premium at $30, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200, with third-party models billed separately by usage. Kiro, from AWS, is credit-based: Free has 50 credits, Pro is $20 for 1,000 credits, and plans run up to Power at $200 for 10,000. Kiro's spec mode turns prompts into requirements, designs and tasks before writing code.

Our pick: Pick Cursor for an editor and agent with a weekly usage pool shared with Grok, cloud agents and third-party models at API list price; pick Kiro for spec-driven development on AWS, billed in credits per user. Updated Nov 3, 2026 (America/Chicago).

By Agentic Weekly, operated independently from Texas, US · Published Oct 25, 2026 · Last updated Nov 3, 2026 (America/Chicago) · How we work

Last verified Nov 3, 2026 (America/Chicago) on Cursor pricing, Kiro pricing, kiro.dev and the Kiro license. Evidence: Reported. We have not run Cursor or Kiro; everything here is from the vendors' own pages.

Cursor prices: cursor.com/pricing · Checked Nov 1, 2026
Kiro prices: kiro.dev/pricing · Checked Nov 1, 2026

Cursor

Anysphere

Reported

Worth a look if you run agents on several repos or want one place for editor, cloud agents and Git hosting; the October changes are mostly for teams.

Kiro

Amazon Web Services

Reported

AWS's agentic coding tool that turns prompts into requirements, designs and tasks (spec mode), with an IDE and a CLI.

Side by side, from what we recorded

Each row compares one recorded fact for both tools. Rows are not weighted and nothing is added up into a score; the note under each row says what the marker means.

Evidence
Reported for Cursor
Reported for Kiro
Tested = we ran it (smoke test); Reported = we read official sources
Pricing we could verify
Verified from official page for Cursor
Verified from official page for Kiro
About our evidence only, not about the price
Steps in our setup guide
3 for Cursor
2 for Kiro
Counts our guide's steps, not difficulty
Sources we cite
4 for Cursor
3 for Kiro
How much we had to read; more is not better

Recorded differences, not a quality score; any head-to-head results we ran are in their own section below. How we label evidence.

Plans and prices side by side

Cursor and Kiro plans (vendor pages read Nov 3, 2026, CT)
Plan tier	Cursor price/month	Cursor usage	Kiro price/user/month	Kiro credits	Overage	Team plan	Models
Free	$0	Limited (limited agent and chat requests)	$0	50	Kiro: no add-on credits listed for Free	n/a	Cursor: limited; Kiro: open-weight models and Claude Sonnet 4.5
Entry	Plus $8	Basic shared pool (Cursor and Grok)	Pro $20	1,000	Cursor: top-offs; Kiro: add-on credits $0.04	n/a	Cursor Plus: Grok models only; Kiro: premium models
Mid	Premium $30	4x Plus	Pro+ $40	2,000	Cursor: top-offs; third-party models billed separately; Kiro: $0.04/credit	n/a	Cursor: latest Grok models + third-party at API list price
High	Super $100	15x Plus	Pro Max $100	5,000	As above	n/a	As above, plus Cursor priority access at peak times
Top	Ultra $200	50x Plus	Power $200	10,000	As above	n/a	As above
Teams	Teams $30+/user; Enterprise custom	Pooled	Enterprise via sales	Not published	n/a	Cursor Teams: SAML/OIDC SSO, usage analytics, centralized billing; Kiro Enterprise: SSO, centralized billing, usage analytics	n/a

Our own pages on this were checked against the same Cursor page on Nov 3 and match: Cursor pricing explained and Cursor. Sources: Cursor pricing, Kiro pricing. More on Kiro: Kiro pricing explained.

How usage is billed

Cursor: one pool of AI usage shared across Cursor and Grok; higher tiers have larger pools, usage costs vary by product, and "your allowance refreshes weekly". Past the pool you can buy top-offs or wait for the refresh. Third-party model usage in Cursor is not included in the monthly price and is billed separately at API list price (Premium and up).
Kiro: "A credit is a unit of work in response to user prompts"; simple prompts can use less than 1 credit. Prompts go to Auto by default, a mix of frontier and specialised models. Add-on credits are $0.04 each on paid plans.
Our arithmetic: at $0.04 an add-on credit, Kiro's 1,000 Pro credits would cost $40 bought separately, so the $20 plan is half the add-on rate. Cursor does not publish a per-unit price for its pool, so there is no like-for-like figure.

Workflow

Kiro: spec-driven development turns prompts into "requirements, architectural designs, and sequenced tasks", then implements them with parallel agents; property-based tests catch edge cases. There is a Kiro IDE and a Kiro CLI (curl -fsSL https://cli.kiro.dev/install | bash).
Cursor: Cursor Agent on every plan; cloud agents and automations, code hosting via Origin and AI code reviews via Bugbot from Premium up.
Licence: Kiro's IDE and CLI are licensed as "AWS Content" under the AWS Customer Agreement (Kiro license), so Kiro is proprietary.

Kiro and Amazon Q Developer

AWS says it will discontinue support for the Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins on April 30, 2027 and points users to Kiro for similar capabilities (AWS, read Nov 3, 2026). If you are coming from Q Developer, see Kiro vs Amazon Q Developer.

Other picks people compare

If you want an open-source agent inside VS Code, look at Cline; for building apps from prompts without an editor, see Base44 alternatives. For more editors, see Cursor vs Windsurf and Claude Code vs Cursor.

Which to pick when

Pick Cursor if you want third-party models at API list price, cloud agents and a usage pool that refreshes weekly.
Pick Kiro if you want specs and task lists before code, work on AWS, or are moving off the Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins.
On a budget: Cursor Plus is $8 but Grok-only; Kiro Free has 50 credits a month.
More: Cursor alternatives, best AI coding agents.

Phone Harness MCP server lets Claude, Cursor and Codex agents drive cloud iPhones and Android emulators (Reported; first seen 2026-11-03 06:01 UTC)
Kensaku: a free, local file launcher that searches inside documents and screenshots, with MCP for agents (Reported; first seen 2026-11-01 10:00 UTC)
Factory releases Droid 1.0, an agent harness that runs hundreds of tool calls per model request (Reported; first seen 2026-10-31 12:44 UTC)
Backdoored Claude Code extension 2.1.312 and 2.1.313 hit Cursor's extension marketplace (Reported; first seen 2026-10-30 13:15 UTC)
Cursor's Agent SDK is generally available: agents as code, with evals and one-command deploys (Reported; first seen 2026-10-27 12:12 UTC)
Superset is now Paradev: parallel coding-agent app ships desktop v2.0.0 and an $11.5M seed (Reported; first seen 2026-10-26 17:05 UTC)

FAQ

Is Kiro cheaper than Cursor?

At entry level, Cursor Plus is $8 a month (Grok models only) and Kiro Pro is $20 per user a month for 1,000 credits. Both top out at $200 a month on self-serve plans (Cursor Ultra, Kiro Power).

Is Kiro open source?

No. Kiro's license page says the Kiro IDE and Kiro CLI are licensed as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement.

Does Cursor include Claude or GPT models?

Cursor's pricing page says third-party models are available from Premium up and billed separately by usage at API list price; Plus is Grok-only.

What is Kiro's spec mode?

Kiro's site calls it spec-driven development: it turns prompts into requirements, architectural designs and sequenced tasks, then implements them with parallel agents.

Sources

Cursor pricing (fetched 2026-11-03)
Kiro pricing (fetched 2026-11-03)
kiro.dev (fetched 2026-11-03)
Kiro license (fetched 2026-11-03)
Amazon Q Developer (end of support notice) (fetched 2026-11-03)

Page history

Oct 25, 2026: First published. Facts read from vendor pages and the GitHub API on 2026-10-25.
Nov 3, 2026: Rewritten in place: answer first, a dated comparison table and sources, with every price re-read on the vendor pages on Nov 3, 2026 (America/Chicago). The page was noindexed before this rewrite.

Markdown version for agents: /compare/cursor-vs-kiro.md

Get The Weekly Verdict, free

One email every Monday. The week's few big releases, each with one call: update now, worth a look, or skip.
5 use cases for the new models, each with a prompt you can paste. Suggested by us, labelled when we have not run them.
Every claim shows its evidence. Reported means we read the sources; Tested means we ran it, with the exact scope and the failures left in.
A free AI Tools Cheat Sheet (web page and printable PDF) lands in your inbox when you confirm.