Cursor vs Supabase
Both are developer tools. Here is what separates them.
What Cursor is
Cursor is a code editor with a model wired into the editing loop rather than bolted on beside it. Its named surfaces are Tab, Agent, Composer, Bugbot, the Cursor CLI, cloud agents and Automations. Tab is the part you touch most. It predicts multi-line edits, missing import statements, the next place in a file you are likely to edit, and edits that span more than one file. A suggestion is accepted with the Tab key and dismissed with Escape or by carrying on typing, and it can be taken word by word with a modifier and the right arrow key when only part of it is right. Tab can be snoozed for a chosen duration, disabled globally, or disabled for specific file extensions. Agent work also happens outside the editor. Cloud agents run in parallel across multiple repositories. Bugbot reviews pull requests inside GitHub. Agents can be summoned in a Slack channel with a mention and reply with pull request links. Automations run agents on a schedule or from a trigger, for jobs such as fixing a CI failure. The Hobby plan is free and takes no credit card. Pro is $20 per month, Pro Plus $60 and Ultra $200, with Pro Plus carrying three times the agent limits of Pro and Ultra twenty times. Teams Standard seats are $40 per user per month and Teams Premium $120, with Premium at five times the agent limits of Standard. Enterprise is quoted by sales, pools usage across the organisation and can be billed by invoice or purchase order. India has a Start plan at 649 INR per month covering Cursor's own models. Paid plans keep two separate usage pools, one for Cursor's own models and one for third-party models charged at that model's API price, and both reset monthly. Pro, Pro Plus and Ultra include unlimited tab completions. Enterprise administration is granular. Admins can allowlist or blocklist specific repositories, models and MCP servers, and set cost controls per team and per user. SAML single sign-on works with Okta, Azure AD and Google Workspace, SCIM handles user provisioning and seat management, and an API reports how much code was written by AI. Turning on Privacy Mode across an organisation stops customer code being used for model training. Cursor runs on AWS and does not offer an on-premises deployment. It holds SOC 2 Type II certification, runs annual penetration testing, encrypts data at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS 1.2 or higher, and states that it holds zero data retention agreements with all of its LLM providers.
What Supabase is
Supabase is an open source backend for web and mobile applications, built around Postgres. Every project gets a dedicated Postgres database, and the rest of the platform is a set of services attached to it rather than a layer that hides it. That decision is the reason to choose it. The database is a real Postgres instance, so SQL, extensions and the wider Postgres ecosystem all work as they normally do, and there is a SQL editor for running queries and mutations directly. REST and GraphQL APIs are generated automatically from the schema, the GraphQL side through a Postgres extension, so an API exists the moment a table does. Auth handles email and password, phone and one-time codes, magic links for passwordless sign-in, and more than twenty social login providers. Access control is enforced with Postgres row-level security policies, which means the rules about who can read which row live in the database rather than in application code that has to remember to apply them. Authentication flows can be extended with serverless functions. Storage is S3-compatible object storage behind a global CDN spanning more than 285 cities, with image transformations available on the way out. Edge Functions are TypeScript on Deno with Node.js compatibility, deployed close to users. Realtime synchronises over WebSockets and covers three distinct cases: listening to database changes, tracking presence so an application knows who is online, and broadcasting messages between clients. For applications that need semantic search or retrieval, the AI toolkit is built on pgvector, storing, indexing and querying embeddings in the same database as everything else rather than in a separate service. There are integrations with OpenAI and Hugging Face, and client libraries make it straightforward to use from JavaScript applications. All the core tools are open source and self-hostable. The hosted platform is free to start on, which makes the practical difference: a project can begin on the managed service and move onto its own infrastructure later without changing the database it was built on.
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