Claude Code vs Cursor
10 members list Claude Code, up 8 in the last 12 weeks
9 members list Cursor, up 8 in the last 12 weeks
How has interest in each changed?
Collected from public datasets outside Stackness, not from stacks on this site. A series both tools have shares one chart and one scale, because its unit is the same for both. Data sources
Mentions, monthly
Claude Code: Hacker News mentions: 1 mention (2024) to 1,489 mentions (2026)
Cursor: Hacker News mentions: 23 mentions (2023) to 20 mentions (2026)
Imported from Hacker News mentions
Installs, monthly
Claude Code: Homebrew analytics installs: 79,995 installs (2026) to 41,581 installs (2026)
Cursor: Homebrew analytics installs: 9,742 installs (2026) to 4,362 installs (2026)
Imported from Homebrew analytics
Questions asked, monthly
Claude Code: Stack Exchange data explorer questions asked: 1 question (2025) to 0 questions (2026)
Cursor: Stack Exchange data explorer questions asked: 3 questions (2009) to 0 questions (2026)
Imported from Stack Exchange data explorer
Usage share, yearly
Claude Code: Stack Overflow developer survey usage share: 9.75 % of respondents (2025)
Cursor: Stack Overflow developer survey usage share: 17.99 % of respondents (2025)
Imported from Stack Overflow developer survey
Series only one of them has
Downloads, monthly
Claude Code: npm downloads: 147,648 downloads (2025) to 55,930,237 downloads (2026). Imported from npm downloads.
Who uses both?
5 members list both Claude Code and Cursor.
0 members moved from Claude Code to Cursor and 1 from Cursor to Claude Code in November 2025.
What do people pair them with?
Tools that members list in the same stack as each of them.
Only with Claude Code
Only with Cursor
Which moves use Claude Code?
- Session summaries beat context decay like coffee beats my ability to function by Sam Rivera
- Context engineering by Stackness
- Throw away your prototype code and rewrite it on purpose by Marcus Cole
Which moves use Cursor?
- Session summaries beat context decay like coffee beats my ability to function by Sam Rivera
- Ask for the plan first, edit never by Elif Yilmaz
- Package domain workflows as reusable agent skills by Stackness
How do they differ?
These two sit at different points of the same workflow. Claude Code is Anthropic's coding agent: you describe a task in the terminal and it reads, edits and runs code across the repository, next to whatever editor you already use. Cursor keeps you in an editor, with tab completion, inline edits and an agent panel, and lets you switch between models from several vendors. People who hand over multi-step tasks and review the result tend to reach for Claude Code. People who want to see and steer every change as it happens tend to prefer Cursor. Plenty of developers run both, and the shared users count on this page shows how common that is.
Written by Sergei Gordeichuk,