ThriveAI vs Cursor and GitHub Copilot

If your IT person already writes code, Cursor or GitHub Copilot can speed that work up for the price of a monthly company seat, plus usage. Going by the vendors’ own pages, neither tool gives you a server to run the result, a connection to your ERP or a place to keep your data in Canada. This page sets the two options side by side, with each fact checked on September 23, 2026, so you can see which one fits your company.

Derik Lawlis Founder, ThriveAI

The short answer

• Pick Cursor or Copilot if you have someone who writes and reviews code, has time to maintain what they build, and already runs a server for internal software. A seat is an inexpensive way to add AI to work that person already does.
• Pick ThriveAI if the job that costs you the most runs across your ERP, email, drawings and spreadsheets, and nobody on staff has the hours to build and run a system for it.
• Use both if your IT person wants a coding tool for their own work and the larger system needs more time than they have.

What Cursor and Copilot do

GitHub Copilot and Cursor are AI tools for writing software, and both are sold to developers. GitHub titles its product page “Your AI coding agent”, and Cursor’s home page describes Cursor as an AI coding agent for building software.

Both tools do more than suggest the next line of code. Copilot’s agent takes an assigned task and opens a pull request, which is a proposed code change for a developer to review. Copilot Business also lists third-party coding agents, Claude by Anthropic and OpenAI Codex, as a preview feature, along with a command-line tool and MCP server integration. Cursor runs its agents in the editor and also offers cloud agents.

What you get from either tool is code. Your IT person decides what to build, checks what the tool writes and runs the result somewhere. GitHub closed GitHub Spark, its hosted app builder, on August 31, 2026, and pointed builders to Copilot in VS Code, the CLI and the Copilot app.

Side by side

The table compares your IT person working with Cursor or Copilot against a project with ThriveAI. Facts about the tools come from each vendor’s own pages, checked September 23, 2026.

How they charge

Both vendors publish their prices, and both charge for usage on top of the seat. The table lists the plans a company would buy.

Both vendors list their prices in US dollars.

GitHub Copilot

Copilot moved to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026. Each Business or Enterprise seat adds its AI Credits to a shared pool, and use beyond the pool is charged per credit unless your admin blocks it. Code completions and Next Edit Suggestions stay unlimited and use no credits, as GitHub confirmed in its April 27, 2026 announcement.

Business and Enterprise are billed monthly for the seats you assign, with seats added mid-cycle billed pro rata. GitHub publishes no seat minimum. Copilot Enterprise is designed for companies on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, which GitHub’s pricing page charges per user per month.

GitHub also sells personal plans, Copilot Pro, Pro+ and Max, each charged per month. GitHub lists no pooled usage, SAML single sign-on, user management or IP indemnity on those plans.

Cursor

Cursor’s pricing page groups Hobby, which is free, and the monthly Pro, Pro+ and Ultra plans under Individual. For a company, the plan is Teams. Cursor’s June 1, 2026 Teams changes, which added the Premium seat, apply to new customers from that date and to renewing customers from billing cycles starting July 1, 2026. Teams can mix Standard and Premium seats, admin-only seats are free, and the plan includes SAML or OIDC single sign-on, team-wide privacy mode and usage analytics.

On Teams, included usage belongs to each user and does not move between members. On-demand usage is on by default and billed after you use it. Models from other providers are charged at their public API list price plus a Cursor Token Rate per million tokens, even when you bring your own API key. Cursor Enterprise is priced per seat with an included usage allotment, and it adds pooled usage, invoice or purchase order billing, SCIM, audit logs and access controls.

The person using the seat

The person who uses the seat is the larger cost. Canada’s Job Bank puts the median wage for information systems specialists, the usual in-house IT role, at $47.00 an hour in Ontario and $46.15 in Quebec. For software developers and programmers, the median is $48.08 in Ontario and $45.67 in Quebec.

By our arithmetic, at 1,950 paid hours a year, an Ontario IT specialist at the median wage earns about CAD 92,000 before benefits and payroll costs. Ten hours of that person’s time costs about CAD 470 in wages. For how seats, usage and staff time add up, see the cost of AI.

Someone also has to check what the tool writes before it touches your ERP data. In the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 84% of respondents used or planned to use AI tools, and more of them distrusted the accuracy of AI output (46%) than trusted it (33%). Their top frustration, named by 66%, was AI solutions that are “almost right, but not quite”, and 45% said debugging AI-generated code takes more time.

What your IT person still builds

Cursor and Copilot write code. In ThriveAI’s reading of their product and pricing pages, neither one hosts or runs the finished tool, gives it a server in Canada or ships a connector to your ERP. Neither vendor says this in one place. GitHub’s plans page says Copilot is not available for GitHub Enterprise Server, its self-hosted product. Cursor does not offer on-premises deployment, and GitHub Spark has closed. For a tool your team uses every day, your IT person still builds or buys the following:

• A server to run the tool on, with backups and monitoring.
• The connection to your ERP or its database.
• Sign-in, and permissions that match who may see which records.
• A log of who asked what and what the system did.
• A model on your own server, or a hosted model under a written no-retention contract.
• Updates when the ERP, the model or the way your team works changes.

Both tools support MCP servers, a standard way to connect an AI tool to other software, so a developer can connect them to your business systems. That connection still has to be built, secured and kept running. If your IT person has the hours and the skills for this list, a coding tool is a sensible way to speed the work up.

Where your data goes

For a manufacturer or distributor, the code matters less than the records the tool reads: prices, drawings, customer orders and supplier terms. Here is what each vendor says happens to them.

GitHub Copilot

GitHub does not use Copilot Business or Enterprise data to train its models. By default, prompts and suggestions in the IDE are not kept. On github.com, mobile, the CLI and other surfaces, they are kept for 28 days, and engagement data is kept for two years. If your IT person buys a personal plan instead, GitHub may train on Free, Pro, Pro+ and Max interactions unless the user opts out.

The models run on their vendors’ clouds: OpenAI models on OpenAI and GitHub’s Azure, Anthropic models on AWS, Anthropic and Google Cloud, Google models on Google Cloud, xAI models on xAI and Microsoft’s own model on Azure. GitHub also offers open-weight models hosted on Azure AI Foundry or Fireworks AI. GitHub states zero data retention agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic, with exceptions for some Anthropic models, and says xAI runs its models for Copilot under a zero data retention policy. Copilot data residency covers the United States and the European Union, only for GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency, and those requests use more AI Credits. That service stores data in the EU, Australia, the US or Japan, with no Canadian region. GitHub also documents bring your own key, which lets developers use a model on their own machine or one hosted by a provider you choose, with an enterprise version in public preview.

Cursor

Every Cursor request goes through Cursor’s backend, including requests made with your own API key. Cursor runs on AWS and does not offer on-premises deployment. Its self-hosted machines run only the tool steps of a cloud agent on your hardware, and Cursor still runs the agent loop, the model calls and the planning.

With Privacy Mode on, Cursor does not train on your data and keeps zero data retention agreements with its model providers. Some models need retention with the provider and an admin’s approval. Teams and Enterprise admins can enforce Privacy Mode, and it is on by default for Enterprise. With it off, Cursor may store and use code, prompts and editor actions to train its models. Data residency is for Enterprise only and covers the US, at a higher model price, with inference-only coverage in the EU and Iceland on request. Canada is not offered.

ThriveAI

The platform ThriveAI builds on is designed to keep your data on its own server in Canada that only your company uses. You choose the model that reads it: one that runs on that server, or a hosted model under a written agreement that the provider keeps nothing after answering. A hosted model may process requests outside Canada, so the contract names the model and its service tier.

What ThriveAI builds

ThriveAI is an AI engineering company in Ottawa that builds private AI systems for manufacturers and distributors in Ontario and Quebec, on their own data. The system brings what your ERP, email, drawings and spreadsheets hold into one database that belongs to your company. Your team asks it questions in plain language, and every answer shows where it came from. It also drafts routine work, such as order entries and purchase orders, for someone on your team to approve.

ThriveAI works hands on with your team, on site, in French or English. Derik Lawlis, the founder, leads every project and stays close to the build. The systems read your ERP as it is, including older versions installed on your own server, and change nothing in it.

Stage one is a working prototype for the one job that costs you the most, at a fixed price, in weeks. It runs on your own systems, and if you stop there, you keep it. Every project is quoted on its own, and no rates are published.

For what this looks like at each desk in a plant, see AI for manufacturing, desk by desk. For the company and Derik’s background, see About ThriveAI.

When to pick each

Pick Cursor or Copilot when

• You have a developer or IT person who reads code and has time to build and maintain tools.
• The work is scripts, reports, spreadsheet tools or changes to software you already maintain.
• You already run a server, backups and sign-in for your internal software.
• Your data rules allow processing in the United States.
• You want a monthly subscription that you can cancel.

Pick ThriveAI when

• The job that costs you the most runs across your ERP, email, drawings and spreadsheets.
• Nobody on staff has the hours to build, run and maintain a system for it.
• You want a system designed to keep your data on your own server in Canada, with a model you choose.
• You want someone on your team to approve every draft before it is sent or saved.
• You want to see a working prototype for one job before you decide on more.

Use both when

Your IT person wants a coding tool for their own work, and the larger system needs more time than they have. ThriveAI works hands on with your team, and that includes your IT person, who can keep using Cursor or Copilot.