Cursor vs JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA

The free Hobby plan provides 2,000 completions per month and 50 slow premium requests, with access to basic autocomplete features. Codebase-wide indexing and the Composer multi-file editor are not available on the free plan.

Yes, IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition is completely free for personal, educational, and commercial use. As of IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3, the Community Edition has been unified with Ultimate, maintaining all core functionality free including Java, Kotlin, Scala, Python, Go, Rust, PHP, and Ruby support.

While Cursor can open and edit files locally, its AI features including autocomplete, chat, agents, and codebase-aware reasoning require internet access to cloud-hosted models.

IntelliJ IDEA supports Java, Kotlin, Scala, Python, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, and more. The free Community Edition includes support for all major languages with new features in Spring, Jakarta EE, Thymeleaf, and other frameworks.

Cursor can integrate with local models, but requests still route through Cursor's backend for prompt building. True localhost mode without external endpoints is not supported. The paid plan ($20+/month) is required to use local models.

Yes, IntelliJ IDEA has built-in Spring Boot integration including the Spring Initializr project wizard, automatic dependency management with Maven and Gradle, code inspections for Spring frameworks, and direct project creation from Spring Initializr.

Cursor offers Privacy Mode (enabled on paid Team plans) which prevents customer data from being used for model training, with zero data retention agreements with all AI providers. When disabled, Cursor may use codebase data to improve features.

Yes, IntelliJ IDEA includes comprehensive Git integration allowing users to create Git repositories, commit changes, push to GitHub, create and merge branches, resolve conflicts, and investigate file history directly from the IDE.

Pro ($20/month) includes unlimited completions and 500 fast premium requests, while Pro+ ($60/month) provides 3x those request limits, priority feature access, and extended Agent capabilities.

IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate subscription starts at $19.90 per month for Individual plans or $29.90 for the All Products Pack. Long-term discounts apply: 20% off year 2 and 40% off year 3 and beyond, reducing the annual cost significantly for loyal users.

SSO with SAML/OIDC is included on Teams Standard ($40/user/month) and higher plans, with full team administration and audit logs.

IntelliJ IDEA offers a cleaner UI and more powerful code assistance capabilities compared to Eclipse's more complex interface. IntelliJ provides better refactoring tools, superior code completion, and optimized performance, while Eclipse remains free and open-source with a larger plugin ecosystem.