Comparison
Nairi vs Cursor Cloud Agents
Cursor Cloud Agents (formerly Background Agents) and Nairi both run AI agents in the cloud. The biggest difference: Nairi agents are shared by default with one team subscription, Cursor's are per-seat with sessions tied to a single user. Here's an honest side-by-side.
TL;DR
Cursor and Nairi are both serious AI agent products in 2026. They make different bets. Cursor is developer-first and IDE-anchored: every Cloud Agent surface assumes a Git repo, models are locked to Max Mode, the agent loop runs in Cursor's AWS infrastructure, and pricing is per-seat with agent sessions owned by the user who started them. Nairi is org-first and conversation-anchored: agents live in Slack and Discord threads where anyone in the channel can talk to them, pricing is one subscription for the whole team, the CLI runtime is per-agent (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, or Cursor itself), and the open-source nairid daemon can run the full agent loop on your own infrastructure.
Pick Cursor if you want the deeper IDE-native experience, Bugbot for automated PR review, or the breadth of the Cursor Marketplace. Pick Nairi if you want multiplayer agents your whole team can use on one subscription, a first-party Discord agent, open-source self-host of the full loop, per-agent runtime choice, or agents that work without a repo.
Side by side
Structural differences first, then the areas where both products land in similar territory.
Pricing model
One subscription per team starting at $20/month. The whole org uses every agent. Sales, support, and non-engineers don't need their own paid seat to talk to an agent in Slack or Discord.
Per-seat pricing. Individual plans (Hobby/Pro/Pro+/Ultra) and Team plans charge by user. Each person who needs to interact with a Cloud Agent needs their own paid seat.
Multi-user collaboration on one agent
Anyone in the Slack or Discord channel can talk to the same agent in the same thread. A teammate can jump in mid-conversation to add context the agent missed, then hand it back. The agent treats the thread as the unit of work, not the individual user.
Cloud Agent sessions are tied to the user who triggered them. Teammates can see the session but can't naturally inject context into someone else's active agent run from inside a thread.
First-party Discord bot
Yes. @-mention an agent in any Discord channel or thread, same model as Slack. OAuth install, scoped channel access.
No first-party Discord bot. There's an open community feature request on the Cursor forum. MCP-based community bots exist but are not Cursor-shipped.
Open-source self-host
The nairid daemon is open-source Go. Runs the full agent loop including model proxying on your own infrastructure. Backend stays managed.
Private Workers (closed beta, team plan only). Tool execution runs on your worker; the agent loop and model inference stay in Cursor's cloud.
Per-agent CLI runtime choice
Pick the CLI per agent: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, or Cursor itself. Different agents in the same org can run different stacks.
Cloud Agents use a curated model list always in Max Mode. There is no toggle to disable Max Mode for Cloud Agents.
Agents without a repo
Agents live in Slack/Discord conversations. Use them for support triage, internal Q&A, ops automation, on-call response, even when no repo is involved.
Every Cloud Agent surface assumes a Git repository. Triggers from Slack, GitHub, Linear, and the web all expect a repo context.
Org-as-tenant from the entry tier
Each org gets isolated containers, RBAC, SSO, and a vault from the lowest paid tier ($20/mo).
SAML SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and org-wide policy lock are on Cursor Enterprise. Lower tiers do not include them.
Native Slack agent in channels
@-mention, scoped channel access, thread-aware conversations, scheduled posts to channels.
@cursor mentions in Slack, list/manage agents inline, repo and model selection via mention syntax.
Native GitHub integration
GitHub App that reviews PRs, comments on issues, opens PRs from chat requests. Repo allowlist per agent.
Comment @cursor on a PR or issue to trigger an agent. Bugbot for automated PR review with autofix.
MCP server support
Per-agent MCP config: bring your own servers for GitHub, Linear, Jira, Notion, Postgres, internal APIs.
First-class MCP support with project-level and global configs. Cursor Marketplace for one-click install; cursor.directory for community servers.
Per-agent rules and skills
Per-agent rules document, skills directory (SKILL.md format), MCP config, env vars.
Project Rules (.cursor/rules), AGENTS.md, Team Rules, plus the same SKILL.md format with .claude/skills compatibility paths.
Sandboxed execution environment
Per-agent isolated container with shell, file system, build tools. Configurable via your own startup scripts and custom tool provisioning.
Isolated VMs in Cursor's AWS infrastructure. Configurable via .cursor/environment.json with three modes: agent-led setup, saved snapshot, or Dockerfile.
Cursor descriptions reflect public docs as of June 2026. Cursor ships changes weekly. Verify the latest at cursor.com/docs/cloud-agent.
Agents are meant to be shared
The first thing teams notice when they try Cursor's background agents for shared use cases (support, on-call, internal Q&A) is that the pricing math gets weird fast. Half the people who'd benefit from talking to the agent aren't engineers and don't use the Cursor app. Buying them paid seats just so they can ask a question in a thread is awkward.
The second thing teams notice is that Cursor sessions are owned by the user who started them. When someone in your support thread is debugging an issue with help from a Cursor agent and a senior engineer wants to jump in to add the missing context, they can't naturally do that. The session belongs to someone else.
Nairi does it the other way around. One subscription covers the whole org. Agents live in shared Slack and Discord channels. The thread is the unit of work, not the user. Anyone in the channel can chime in mid-conversation to correct the agent or add context, and the agent picks up from there. That's what makes agents actually adopt across the team instead of remaining a single-developer side tool.
Where the agent lives
The cleanest way to think about the difference: Cursor agents are anchored to a repo. Nairi agents are anchored to a conversation.
Every Cursor Cloud Agent trigger assumes a Git repository. The Slack bot, the GitHub and Linear triggers, and the Web and Desktop surfaces all start from a repo. That fits the product: Cursor is a developer tool company, and most coding work happens against a repo.
Nairi makes the opposite choice. Agents live in Slack and Discord threads. They can be repo-aware (the GitHub integration lets agents read and write code) but they don't require a repo to be useful. Common Nairi use cases that don't fit the repo-bound model: on-call response, support triage, internal Q&A bots, ops automation, scheduled reports that summarize cross-tool state, internal AI platforms in the style of Spotify's Honk.
If your work is mostly "do something with a codebase," Cursor's surface choice is the cleaner fit. If your work is "have agents available where my team already talks," Nairi's chat-anchored model is the cleaner fit. Many teams want both, which is why running them side by side is a reasonable option.
Open-source self-host, precisely
Both products have a "run it on your own infrastructure" story. They are not the same architecture, and the difference matters if you are in a regulated industry, need air-gapped operation, or have strict rules about which model providers can see your code.
Cursor's Private Workers feature (currently closed beta, team plan only) lets you run the tool-execution process on your own Kubernetes cluster. The worker maintains a long-lived outbound connection to Cursor's cloud. When the agent decides to run a command or edit a file, Cursor's cloud sends the tool call over that connection and the worker executes it locally. The agent loop itself, and model inference, remain in Cursor's AWS infrastructure.
Nairi's nairid daemon is different. It's open-source Go, available today, and it runs the entire agent loop including model proxying inside your environment. The Nairi backend handles user-facing orchestration (Slack OAuth, dashboard, vault, billing) but agent execution happens on your infrastructure with whichever model provider keys you configure. For teams that need a hard data boundary, this is a structural difference, not a marketing one.
We don't position this as a Cursor weakness. They've explicitly said a Helm chart and Kubernetes operator are on the roadmap, and Private Workers will likely mature. As of mid-2026 the gap is real: full agent loop in your environment via nairid versus tool execution only via Private Workers.
Where Cursor wins
Honest comparison pages need to be honest both ways. Here's where we wouldn't try to claim parity.
IDE-native experience. Cursor 3.0's Agents Window, Composer 2.5 for in-editor work, parallel agents in worktrees, Design Mode, the Await tool, and best-of-n parallel multi-model comparison are features that only make sense inside the editor. If you want an editor that runs agents next to your cursor, Cursor is the right pick.
Bugbot for automated PR review. Mature, configurable via .cursor/BUGBOT.md, supports learned rules, MCP integration, and Bugbot Autofix that spawns Cloud Agents for fixes. Nairi has PR review through the GitHub integration but Bugbot is the more polished offering today.
Composer 2.5. Cursor ships and tunes their own coding model. Nairi is a platform, not a model lab. If model quality at a given price point is the main thing you care about, Cursor has the advantage.
Marketplace and ecosystem. Cursor Marketplace has plugins from Atlassian, Datadog, GitLab, Hugging Face, and other major vendors. cursor.directory adds a community layer on top. Nairi's MCP story leans on Composio for the connector layer, which is a smaller ecosystem.
Automations breadth. Cursor Automations supports GitHub and GitLab PR events, Slack messages, Linear issues, Sentry, PagerDuty, webhooks, and cron, with prebuilt templates and memory across runs. Nairi has scheduled jobs but a narrower event-trigger surface today.
Common questions
What teams ask when they're weighing the two.
Try Nairi in Slack or Discord
Install the Slack or Discord app, pick your channels, mention an agent. Two minutes, no infra to deploy. nairid is open-source when you want to bring it home.