OpenHands vs Cursor (2026)

OpenHands

by All Hands AI

Cursor

by Anysphere

Pros

• ✓Runs the full autonomous software engineering loop: reads an issue, writes code, runs tests, debugs failures and submits a pull request without per-step human direction.
• ✓Open source under MIT with bring-your-own-key model support, so it self-hosts on your own infrastructure with your choice of model and carries no vendor lock-in. It has 89.7k GitHub stars.
• ✓All Hands AI publishes the OpenHands Index, a public leaderboard scoring 33 model configurations across five categories of real engineering work, with per-category cost, runtime and downloadable logs. Very few commercial coding agents publish comparable evidence.
• ✓Jira, Slack and Git provider integrations, MCP support and the Cloud Agent SDK are included on every tier, including the two free ones, and scheduled and event-driven automations can open pull requests without a developer at the keyboard.

Limitations

• –Training depends on the tier. On the free hosted Individual tier the privacy policy states that All Hands AI may use content and feedback from your use of the Services to train and tune its AI models, with no opt-out published. Under an Enterprise Customer Agreement customer data is not used for training, and the self-hosted Open Source build sends nothing to the vendor.
• –The Vanta trust center names no certification. The vendor's Security FAQ dated July 2026 records SOC 2 Type II as in progress and ISO 27001 as not yet held, so there is no completed attestation to point at.
• –Enterprise is the only route to multi-user RBAC, SAML and SSO, centralized billing, the Agent Control Plane, the Large Codebase SDK and Azure DevOps, and its price is not published. The free hosted Individual tier is capped at 10 conversations per day.

Pros

• ✓Agent mode plans and implements features autonomously across multiple files, and cloud subagents run in parallel on their own VMs and branches.
• ✓Full VS Code compatibility means near-zero migration cost, because existing extensions, keybindings, themes and workflows carry over immediately.
• ✓Privacy Mode is available on every plan including the free tier, and is on by default for Teams and Enterprise, where admins can enforce it.
• ✓Self-Hosted Machines runs Cloud Agent tool execution on hardware the team manages, keeping the codebase, build outputs and secrets on internal machines.

Limitations

• –Privacy Mode is off by default on the Hobby and Individual plans, where Cursor states it may store and use codebase data, prompts, editor actions and code snippets to improve the product.
• –Model inference always routes through Cursor's cloud, including when you supply your own API keys, and zero data retention does not apply to those keys. US-only data residency is Enterprise only.
• –Expensive model usage depletes included credits faster than standard models, and agentic code review with Bugbot runs on usage-based billing on Individual rather than being included as it is on Teams.