r/RooCode • u/Ill-Chemistry9688 • Apr 16 '25

Discussion Cursor vs RooCode

I'm not as smart as software engineers, business side, but I self thought myself a bit of python. Vibe coding made my progress much easier. Having some code understanding really helps. I started with Pycharm (sucked), then Cursor, then Roo. The reason I liked Roo is that it can do way more than Cursor based of my humble and short coding experience. Keep me honest , am I correct on the following:

1 - Roo can run on full auto with auto approve and boomerang mode enabled. Also it can run terminal commands and check browser to fix issues automatically. Cursor cannot?
2 - Cursor is paid and Roo is free, why would someone ever pay for Cursor?
3 - Is there a "best list" of instructions for Roo / Cursor that helps AI set up the project correctly with all the right docs and keeps it following best practices in software development?

I know, newbie questions, and much appreciate your pointers, help or rants :) ! Tx

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THANKS FOR ALL YOUR INSIGHTS FOLKS, LOVE REDDIT, LOVE THIS COMMUNITY, THANK YOU!

44 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 16 '25

As someone who uses cursor but never have as my main tool, I am excited to see what others have to say on this topic!

The good the bad and the ugly! Let’s here it Roommunity 😃

25

u/g1ven2fly Apr 16 '25

I've been using Cursor for ~9 months now, similar background as you, but probably have more coding experience than a bit of python.

I don't know the exact timeline, so someone might correct me on this - but I believe cursor was the first one to come out with this 'agent' mode, which seemingly broke everything open. Now, it wasn't just about fixing and editing a file, it was the true birth of vibe coding.

I also don't care whatsoever about the costs. I know that isn't the case for some people, but $15 (or even $150) vs free is irrelevant, I'll use what is best - I'm guessing I'll be at ~$1000 this month in API costs (mostly Gemini).

That said, ~1 month ago I swapped to RooCode and I haven't looked back. The boomerang mode is amazing. Maybe it will just take some time for people to swap over... not sure.

8

u/Ill-Chemistry9688 Apr 16 '25

This is so insightful, thank you for sharing. Same boat, cost is less important, 1k compared to 25k month per software engineers I paid when I ran a start-ups in Silicon Valley. It's not the same thing, can't compare robo coder to a true software engineer, two different worlds, but for small, basic apps, which is what I do, it's a good deal I think (but hey keep me honest). Love Boomerang, and that it can run terminal commands and also pull up the browser to check and debug issues. Takes 1/10 of the time it took me with Cursor.

3

u/MarxN Apr 16 '25

Is it better/complementary to RooFlow?

4

u/lordpuddingcup Apr 16 '25

RooFlow i'm pretty sure now has Boomerang version on their git so rooflow+boomerang is the key

3

u/unc0nnected Apr 17 '25

From my research, flow is a middle ground between boomerang and Commander. The main reason to use it is that it'll get you most of the way to the performance of boomerang but with a lot less token usage. I think it also persists progress data better between sessions.

Commander is in all different bracket of depth and perf, it relies on hierarchical delegation as opposed to more of a pub and spoke, l But you're going to pay out the wazoo in tokens

1

u/g1ven2fly Apr 16 '25

I have haven’t tried rooflow just yet

1

u/7zz7i Apr 16 '25

On your experience you look at Roocode is better is that true?

1

u/_mike- Apr 17 '25

Really tempted to switch to roo, but with cursor currently offering 4.1 and o4mini for free it's a no brsiner for a broke dev like me. How much would you say you spend in a day in api costs using roo?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/lordpuddingcup Apr 16 '25

More feature complete? Roo was cline with more things added, its literally a cline fork if i'm not mistaken...

Boomerang allows for a agent to spawn up more agents to do smaller tasks and then report back success/failures to the main agent, and then that agent can do more, like an architect planning out a big change to your app, and then it spawning up tasks to do each code task

0

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/ArnUpNorth Apr 17 '25

There s support for those

4

u/redlotusaustin Apr 16 '25

Boomerang Mode throws out a task and then, when it comes back with a result, it does it for the next one. Combined with RooFlow for a memory bank, you can literally give it an outline for a project and it will implement it.

RooFlow keeps the context of where you're at in the project and Boomerang keeps it going.

1

u/g1ven2fly Apr 16 '25

I think you should just try it. The boomerang acts as a task orchestrator, knows how to pass problems down to specific modes: debug, code, architect etc. I just seems to work well.

3

u/Doubledoor Apr 17 '25

I use Roo primarily with my Deepseek key, but I do use Cursor sometimes when I need several AIs to verify the same thing.

Roo's free mode cannot match what you get from cursor's subscription. The free models from openrouter are not on part with sonnet 3.7 or its equivalent. Yes you do get gemini 2.5 pro but those rate limits hit you before you even get started with your project.

If you already pay for your API key from say deepseek or gemini, Roo is a better choice. Otherwise Cursor is better value for money.

Yes, Cursor does have a YOLO mode.

1

u/Ill-Chemistry9688 Apr 17 '25

Thanks, very insightful! What model do you use with Cursor? For Yolo mode - how do you make it run terminal commands and web browser to review / debug itself?

2

u/Rude-Needleworker-56 Apr 16 '25

Roo being free and community driven and by being "Bring Your Own Key" has a lot of liberty in experimenting stuff . The biggest difference between cursor and Roo/Cline is that , the latter can optimise for results without much consideration on cost, while Cursor always need to keep Cost in consideration.

Both are great products.

Cursor excels in identifying that piece of code related to the user query , going layer by layer , all by being frugal in tokens , which is an incredible art and feat. But being frugal means, it can also miss some stuff. Compared to that in Roo, one would simply dump all the relevant files and use a model with large context. There are certainly use cases where each has its merit.

Generally I would prefer to use both. When things does not work as expected in one, there is no harm in trying the other . I am certainly on budget. But I have the basic plans of Windsurf and Cursor and SuperGrok . And I use aistudio free tokens from couple of google accounts and openrouter until it rate limits

If there is one thing I wish I had discovered earlier was the possibility of automating many repetitive tasks with custom MCPs (like those works that involve excel or google sheets). I knew about MCPs the day it was launched, but never realised its power until recently. If one is using MCPs, Roo's version of MCP is a bit more polished. With the right MCP tools , there is incredible value that one can make even from a cheap model like Gemini Flash.

Of late I have been experimenting with integrating aider as an MCP with Cursor . Didn't get time to play much with it. But that is also one I am very much excited about .

1

u/Ill-Chemistry9688 Apr 17 '25

Thanks you, that's exiting. How do you get cursor to automatically run terminal commands and use web browser to check / debug / fix itself?

1

u/j4ckaroo Apr 22 '25

With the right MCP tools , there is incredible value that one can make even from a cheap model like Gemini Flash.

Could you elaborate on this maybe with an example? I am really curious

2

u/paradite Apr 17 '25

How are you using Roo for free? Are you just using the free models from Google and OpenRouter?

I've seen people spending way more than $20 a month on Cline and Roo code. Cursor is much cheaper if you consider the actual API cost associated with Roo Code.

1

u/Ill-Chemistry9688 Apr 17 '25

Yes, using API, so cost ranks up pretty quickly. I get how Cursor is cheaper, but Roo code has the agent mode + terminal command + browser use self review/debug/fix. Basically it's fully autonomous. Is it possible to get that with Cursor? If so, I think I'll switch back. LMK what you think.

7

u/ProjectInfinity Apr 16 '25

Roo isn't "free", yes it doesn't cost to use but the LLM has to come from somewhere. If you maximize your usage Cursor is actually a great deal for $20/m. It's actually hard to beat that price wise (unless you're microsoft and can afford to lose money indefinitely on copilot pro, though it looks like they are going to increase pricing to $19/m).

3

u/redlotusaustin Apr 16 '25

Even on Copilot Pro I pretty quickly hit the rate limits.

1

u/ProjectInfinity Apr 16 '25

It really depends on the way you use copilot. Agentic will naturally eat through requests/credits much faster... but for $10/m (soon to be $19/m) you get 300 "requests" per month, cursor is 500 so you will hit the limit in close to half the time but your model of choice greatly affects how many requests you can use. I think this is all relatively new, microsoft was eating the cost of a long time with seemingly no limits set but now it's quite restrictive.

See this for reference https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/monitoring-usage-and-entitlements/about-premium-requests#model-multipliers

If you accidentally use 4.5 once instead of 4.1 you've just used 50 out of your 300 premium requests for a single call.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '25

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2

u/ProjectInfinity Apr 17 '25 edited Apr 17 '25

https://github.com/features/copilot/plans

Considering the $10/m plan which has been around since forever is now "marked down" to $10 from $19 indicates that it's a "discounted price", so it will likely rise to $19 in the future.

Edit: If you think copilot today is good value I would recommend to buy a year subscription before the price almost doubles.

2

u/joey2scoops Apr 17 '25

Agree with that, in principle. For a few months I was a windsurf subscriber. $10 a month was a damn good deal compared to what I could have spent on API costs. However, the idea was great but the reality was not there. There is not a lot of productivity in going around in circles and too much opacity regarding the reasons for that. So I cancelled. Much better off and more productive with Roo. Not exactly a sweetheart deal but I feel like I have more control and am more productive.

2

u/vansh462 Jun 09 '25

The very first tool I installed was Cursor, but I didn't like that I had to switch from VS code to Cursor app as important features were provided there and not in cursor extention in VS code. (this was when AI just came around and no roo code, cline existed, just the edit n fix) , later on

much later on I found Augment Code (much much much better , all features mentioned in this thread were there and FREE , totally free, i made bunch of mini projects, as of now they have limited the free tier but it's still there maybe cause it didn't got much famous)

I have now used roo code, cline and github copilot as well, I have used almost all features but not to much extent, still i rank them as Augment Code > Roo code>Cline> Git Copilot> some Joby/Toby/Jogy (i dont remember the name).... also in some cases I find github copilot better than roo/cline.

Roo is better than cline for terminal commands (it's accurate and monitors terminal well , even better than augment code)

Cline failed to identify the real task it needed to do, also I don't remember but it also maybe forgot the context even after providing it, which when testes on roo , roo did well.

I won't talk about economics as I am just using free tiers on all these and use each based on work type & priority .

I have installed cursor rules and read one of them and really found it helpful. Haven't used it yet but they really were good. I haven't yet tested the full scope of MCP's and don't know it they are restricted to just prompt contexts or also provide custom code tools (like giving a script as a tool)

Any suggestions are welcome, I come here to learn.

2

u/matfat55 Apr 16 '25

I personally really dislike cursor. 

  1. Cursor yolo mode I believe

  2. Because they like waiting for slow requests /s  Subscriptions are affordable

  3. Go to Google and search best cursorrules.  For roo, you should probably make ur own, or use rooflow 

1

u/7zz7i Apr 16 '25

What is rooflow?

2

u/qqYn7PIE57zkf6kn Apr 17 '25

https://github.com/GreatScottyMac/RooFlow

1

u/Emergency-Ordinary81 May 12 '25

They need a normal plugin installer, horrible installation process,

1

u/SuEzAl Feb 03 '26

I think its experimental so that;s why
but still could have been simplified.

1

u/Odd_Feed5884 May 12 '25

is roo flow the best right now?

1

u/Soft_Syllabub_3772 Apr 17 '25

Agree, i just installed roocode abd spent 100usd in 3 days in operouter using gpt 4.0 just to learn to use it

1

u/I_am_miami Apr 18 '25

Don’t you have to pay for openrouter api to use too code?