# CodeHerder vs Cursor

Cursor vs CodeHerder: sourced and dated. Cursor ties harness and billing to one vendor; CodeHerder treats that choice as the buyer's to make.

Source: https://codeherder.com/compare/cursor/

Compare · Tier B

Cursor's background agents, tied to its own harness and billing, now paired with Graphite's code review after Cursor's December 2025 acquisition.

Verified against the vendor's own published materials.

## What Cursor actually ships

- Background agents running on Cursor's own harness and billing
- Graphite's code-review tooling, pulled directly into the same product stack since the December 2025 acquisition

## Where it's strong

- A tight, single-vendor loop from agent to review, inside one product a lot of developers already use

## How CodeHerder differs

- Cursor makes one vendor's harness and billing the whole product; CodeHerder treats harness and model choice as something the buyer controls

> Model and harness plurality is a deliberate CodeHerder design goal, precisely because Cursor and the other vendor-integrated background agents make a single vendor's harness and billing the whole product.

Capability snapshot

## CodeHerder vs Cursor, capability by capability

Every row traces to the same source as [the full matrix](https://codeherder.com/compare), where the full legend lives. In short: "not published" means no public evidence was found, not that the feature is absent. Verified as of 2026-08-08.

Capability comparison between CodeHerder and Cursor across 20 capabilities, current as of 2026-08-08.

| Capability | CodeHerder | Cursor |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Concurrent agents | Published | Published |
| Multi-vendor harnesses | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) [[1]](https://codeherder.com/compare/cursor/#fn1) |
| Customer-owned machines | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Multi-machine routing | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Automatic work assignment | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Capability-based routing | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Atomic claiming | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Dependencies | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Custom workflows | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Server-enforced gates | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Agent handoffs | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Persistent shared memory | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Live terminal / view | Published | Unverified |
| Human takeover / steer | Published | Unverified |
| Cost per task | Published | Unverified |
| Cost per stage/model | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Hard $ cap | Published | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |
| Schedules | Published | Unverified |
| Webhooks / API / CLI | Published | Unverified |
| Self-host full platform | Published (Enterprise) | Not published (as of 2026-08-08) |

1. Factory (Droids), Devin, and Claude Code Agent Teams are each vertically integrated — the product's whole thesis is a single vendor's own agent(s), so "multi-vendor harness support" isn't just unpublished, it's outside the product's own stated shape. Still written as "not published" rather than a claim of proven absence, per this tree's own rule.

## Sources

Verified against Cursor's own site as of 2026-08-08.

- Cursor: welcoming Graphite

[← See every platform on the matrix](https://codeherder.com/compare)