Cursor and Sentrely solve completely different problems. Cursor is an AI-first IDE — a fork of VS Code that gives developers Tab-completion, in-line chat, and agent mode for refactoring code. Sentrely is the control plane that sits behind tools like Cursor, governing what its agents are allowed to do once they leave the editor.
If you’re a solo developer writing code, you want Cursor. If you’re a team running Cursor (or any other AI agent) against production infrastructure, you want both.
What Cursor Is
Cursor is the editor your developers actually open. It provides:
- Tab completion that’s aware of your whole repo
- Inline chat (“⌘K”) to edit blocks of code
- Agent mode — autonomous multi-file refactors and bug fixes
- Composer — repo-aware code generation
- MCP support — connect Cursor to external tools
Cursor lives on a developer’s laptop. It writes code. It can run shell commands. It can hit your APIs. It’s incredible for individual productivity.
What Sentrely Is
Sentrely is the gateway between your AI agents (including Cursor’s agent mode) and the outside world. It provides:
- Policy-based RBAC — which AWS actions, git repos, and tools each agent can touch
- Audit trail — every tool call, approval, and API request, logged automatically
- Human-in-the-loop approvals — risky operations gate on your approval, delivered via Slack or Telegram
- Multi-provider failover — define a backup model so an outage at Claude doesn’t stop your agents
- Cost controls — per-project token budgets, rate limits, spend alerts
Sentrely doesn’t write code. It makes sure the agents that do write code don’t push to main without approval, leak secrets, or burn $4.20 in tokens looping on a 429.
When You Need Both
This is the most common case for engineering teams that have adopted Cursor:
- Developers use Cursor day-to-day for editing code.
- Cursor’s agent mode connects to Sentrely as the gateway URL.
- Every shell command, AWS call, and tool invocation Cursor agents make routes through Sentrely’s policy engine.
- Risky operations (push to main, delete production data, rotate secrets) gate on approval in Slack.
- Every agent run is recorded in an immutable audit log streamed to your S3.
The result: your developers keep the productivity of Cursor agent mode, your security team gets the controls they need, and your audit team gets compliance evidence by default.
Honest Trade-offs
Pick Cursor alone if you’re a solo dev or small startup with no production infrastructure to protect. The IDE experience is excellent on its own.
Pick Sentrely alone if your agents aren’t running through Cursor — you have custom Claude Code or OpenAI Codex agents in your CI/CD pipeline, on a server, or in a Lambda.
Pick both if you’re a team of 5+ developers using Cursor agent mode against shared infrastructure. Cursor accelerates writing; Sentrely keeps the writing safe.
Pricing
- Cursor Pro: $20/month per user. Cursor Business: $40/user/month.
- Sentrely: $199/month for a team (10 agents, 2 seats). $999/month for business (20 agents, 10 seats, SSO/SCIM).
These aren’t competing line items — Cursor is per-developer, Sentrely is per-team. Most teams running both end up with Cursor Pro on every developer plus one Sentrely Team or Business plan.
The Bottom Line
Cursor makes your developers faster. Sentrely makes the agents your developers spawn safe to run in production. Use them together — Cursor in front of the keyboard, Sentrely behind every API call.