Cursor vs Claude Code vs Codex vs Antigravity: which AI coding tool in 2026?

These four tools are not the same kind of thing. Cursor and Antigravity are editors you work inside. Claude Code and Codex are agents you direct from your terminal, an IDE, a desktop app or the browser, and both come with a chat subscription: Claude Code with Claude's paid plans, Codex with ChatGPT plans, including limited access on the free plan. The right choice depends less on which is "smartest" and more on how you like to work and what you can pay.

Every price below comes from the vendor's own pages, checked on 30 September 2026. Prices and limits change often, so the date matters.

Cursor: an AI editor with a free plan

Cursor is a code editor with AI built into everything: tab completion as you type, an agent that can make changes across your project, and cloud agents that work while you do something else.

Its free Hobby plan needs no credit card and includes a limited number of agent requests, which is enough to find out whether you like working this way. The Pro plan is $20 a month.

For developers in India, Cursor's documentation lists a separate Start plan at ₹649 a month including tax, billed in rupees by UPI, credit or debit card. It is cheaper than Pro, and it leaves some things out: on-demand usage, Bugbot, Auto, some models and a few other features. For a student or a first project, that trade is usually fine.

The catch with Cursor is usage. Each plan includes a monthly allowance; when you go past it, you either pay for on-demand usage or upgrade.

Best for: people who want to stay in a familiar editor and let AI help at every step.

Claude Code: an agent that works where you do

Claude Code is Anthropic's coding agent. It reads your codebase, edits files and runs commands. It works in your terminal, in an IDE, in the Claude desktop app and in the browser.

There is no free way to use it through the free Claude plan: Claude Code is included in paid plans only, or you can pay as you go through an Anthropic Console account. Pro costs $20 a month, or $17 a month if you pay $200 for a year up front. Max costs $100 a month for five times Pro's usage, or $200 a month for twenty times. Prices don't include tax.

Usage limits reset on a rolling five-hour window, and paid plans add weekly limits on top. Your chats in the Claude app and your Claude Code sessions draw from the same pool, so a heavy day of chatting leaves less for coding.

Anthropic's pricing page shows US dollars. India is on its list of supported regions.

Best for: developers who are comfortable in a terminal and want an agent to carry out bigger, multi-step changes.

Codex: OpenAI's agent, included with ChatGPT

Codex is OpenAI's coding agent. You can use it on the web, from its command-line tool, in an IDE extension and on iOS, and it is included in ChatGPT plans. The command-line tool is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence.

ChatGPT's free plan includes limited Codex access. The cheapest paid plan, Go, is $8 a month in the US and ₹399 a month in India, and OpenAI describes its Codex use as being for lightweight coding tasks. Plus is $20 a month, or ₹1,999 in India. ChatGPT plans are billed in rupees in India, and UPI works for Go and Plus.

Your usage allowance depends on your plan, and local work and cloud tasks share the same allowance.

Best for: people who already pay for ChatGPT, and anyone in India who wants a rupee plan with UPI.

Antigravity: Google's agentic IDE with a free start

Google Antigravity is Google's agentic development platform: an IDE, an agent manager and a command-line tool.

Its free tier gives individuals unlimited tab completions and unlimited command requests, with basic weekly rate limits on the agent. Paid access starts with Google AI Pro, which is $19.99 a month in the US and ₹1,950 a month in India. On Pro, limits refresh every five hours until you reach a weekly cap.

Best for: trying agent-style coding without paying anything, or people already paying for Google AI Pro.

Which one should you pick?

Start from your situation, not from benchmarks:

• A student with no budget: start with Cursor's Hobby plan, or Antigravity's free tier if you are 18 or older (Google doesn't offer Antigravity to under-18s). Both let you learn how to work with an AI coding tool before spending anything.
• A developer in India who wants to pay in rupees: Cursor's Start plan (₹649) and ChatGPT Go with Codex (₹399) are both billed in rupees, and both accept UPI.
• A developer in an existing codebase: Cursor if you want to stay in an editor, Claude Code if you prefer to describe a change and review the result.
• A non-technical founder: none of these is the easiest start. An AI app builder usually is. Read choosing your build path first.

You don't have to choose only one. Many of these tools can be used side by side, and trying two free tiers for a week will teach you more than any comparison.

What none of them does for you

Every one of these tools can write code that looks right and isn't. They don't know your business rules, they can't tell whether a database rule leaks data, and they will happily delete a failing test instead of fixing it.

Whichever tool you choose, read what it changes before you ship it. Our AI code review checklist is a good routine to start with, and the full list of tools we have checked is on the AI coding tools page.