An excellent editor that also runs parallel cloud agents, scheduled automations and triggered runs. Those agents run in Cursor's own sandboxes, and the product is proprietary with paid tiers.
Connect your Cursor Pro account and intentic runs Cursor's own agent as one of its harnesses, on your hardware, spending the included usage you already pay for. Keep Cursor as your editor; desktop sync opens the agent's latest work there.
Head to head
1 of 12 rows go to Cursor: ▸ marks them
Where you agree · both run agents in parallel with a plan you approve and a diff you review, both reach you on a phone, and both let an agent start itself on a schedule or event. And intentic runs Cursor's agent itself, so the model that answers can be the same one either way.
| Dimension | intentic | Cursor |
|---|---|---|
| Where the agent runs | a Docker sandbox | Cursor's cloud sandboxes, or your local IDE |
| The editor | a shared editor plus desktop sync to the one you have | ▸a first-class AI IDE and its strongest surface |
| Model choice | 6 native harnesses on your own subscriptions, Cursor's among them, plus any ACP agent | every frontier model, on Cursor's plan |
| Parallel / cloud agents | a fleet of worktree-isolated agents across your sandbox and connected runners | fleets of cloud agents on Cursor's infrastructure |
| What you can change about the environment | the image, the capabilities, the context loaded each turn | your local machine; the cloud agent's sandbox is theirs |
| Where credentials live | inside a sandbox you own, injected per turn | with Cursor for the cloud agent's run |
| Running Cursor's agent | yes, on your hardware, on your Cursor Pro included usage | yes, in Cursor's editor and its cloud sandboxes |
| Starts on an event | automations: cron, webhook, chat, email, CI/CD, workspace events | schedules and triggers from GitHub, Slack, Linear, webhooks |
| Licence | MIT for the sandbox, platform and CLI | proprietary |
| Price | free, on your own model subscription | free tier; Pro from $20/user, cloud agents on paid plans |
| Isolation | one sandbox container for the fleet; one git worktree per agent, on your machines | a Cursor-managed VM per cloud agent; the local agent edits your tree |
| Review workflow | the diff in the Changes panel, approved before it lands | checkpoints you can restore, and pull requests from cloud agents |
What it comes down to
Whose machine the cloud agent runs on
Cursor's cloud agents run in Cursor's own sandboxes, on infrastructure you do not control. An intentic sandbox runs on your laptop, desktop or VPS and dials out over a private tunnel, so the same browser experience never moves your code, even when the agent driving it is Cursor's.
What sits around the agent
Run under intentic, a Cursor turn picks up things the agent does not ship with: your command rules can stop a shell command and wait for your answer, its questions arrive as cards you click, and it can reach the browser and the accounts your other agents use. The one thing that does not carry over is Cursor's own editor experience, which is why the two are better together than either alone.
Open and free, versus a metered plan
Cursor is proprietary, from $20/user, with cloud agents on paid plans. intentic is MIT end to end and free, on your own subscription, with no proxy, markup or per-seat charge.
Keep Cursor as your editor, and bring its agent along
Nothing here asks you to give up Cursor, or to stop paying for it. Connect the account and its agent becomes one of the harnesses your fleet runs, on your own machine; desktop sync then mirrors the sandbox back so you open the result in the editor you already know.
Pick Cursor when
You want the best AI editor under your own hands, and running cloud agents on Cursor's infrastructure is a trade you are happy to make rather than one you would rather host yourself.
How this was checked
Every claim about Cursor on this page is drawn from its own documentation, last read on . These products move fast. Spot something out of date? Open an issue and it is fixed in the next build.