I was referring to UX, as that is the main product. Cursor isn't providing their own models, or at least most people that I'm aware of are bringing their own keys.
I haven't used copilot extensively but my understanding is that they now have feature parity at the IDE level, but the underlying models aren't as good.
My experience is that copilot is basically a better autocomplete, but anything beyond a three liner will deviate from current context making the answer useless - not following the codebase's convention, using packages that aren't present, not seeing the big picture, and so on.
In contrast, cursor is eerily aware of its surroundings, being able to point out that your choice of naming conflicts with somewhere else, that your test is failing because of a weird config in a completely different place leaking to your suite, and so on.
I use cursor without bringing my own keys, so it defaults to claude-3.5-sonnet. I always use it in composer mode. Though I can't tell you with full certainty the reasons for its better performance, I strongly suspect it's related to how it searches the codebase for context to provide the model with.
It gets to the point that I'm frequently starting tasks by dropping a Jira description with some extra info to it directly and watching it work. It won't do the job by itself in one shot, but it will surface entry points, issues and small details in such a way that it's more useful to start there than from a blank slate, which is already a big plus.
It can also be used as a rubber duck colleague asking it whether a design is good, potential for refactorings, bottlenecks, boy scouting and so on.
For use cases demanding the most intelligent model, yes they aren't.
However, there are cases that you just can't use best models due to latency. For example next edit prediction, and applying diffs [0] generated by the super intelligent model you decided to use. AFAIK, Cursor does use their own model for these, which is why you can't use Cursor without paying them $20/mo even if you bring your own Anthropic API key. Applying what Claude generated in Copilot is just so painfully slow to the point that I just don't want to use it.
If you tried Cursor early on, I recommend you update your prior now. Cursor had been redesigned about a year ago, and it is a completely different product compared to what they first released 2 years ago.
[0] We may not need a model to apply diff soon, as Aider leaderboard shows, recent models started to be able to generate perfect diff that actually applies.
(I most recently used cursor in October before switching to Avante, so I suspect I've experienced the version of the tool you're talking about. I mostly didn't use the autocomplete, I mostly used the chat-q&a sidebar.)
I was referring to UX, as that is the main product. Cursor isn't providing their own models, or at least most people that I'm aware of are bringing their own keys.
I haven't used copilot extensively but my understanding is that they now have feature parity at the IDE level, but the underlying models aren't as good.