Comparison
Cursor: Hosted in-IDE agent vs. self-hosted overnight desk.
Cursor ships a per-tab in-IDE agent that runs as a managed process on the developer’s laptop and applies suggested edits to the files open in the user’s editor session. Driftlock runs offline inside the customer’s VPC and reads overnight engineering signals — a CI failure, a Dependabot alert, a CVE, an on-call page — producing one signed pull request per signal. Where Cursor optimises for in-editor assistance against the developer’s checkout, Driftlock optimises for the audit-linked PR: the seven-column record a regulator replays on the customer’s storage tier without going through Cursor’s hosted control plane.
Posture
Driftlock runs self-hosted in your VPC; no third-party LLM is ever called at the test step.
Identity
Commits sign with your cosign key in your KMS or HSM. Keys rotate on your schedule.
Audit
Seven per-PR columns — alert id, sandbox run hash, SBOM hash, approver chain, signature, diff bytes, triage verdict — replayable on your storage tier.
What they do
Cursor in one paragraph.
Cursor is a per-tab in-IDE agent that runs as a managed process on the developer’s laptop and applies suggested edits to the files open in the user’s editor session; the unit of work is one editor tab in an active coding session, and the agent runs against the host repository inside Cursor’s managed control plane.
Where Driftlock differs
Eight dimensions where the posture diverges.
Each row names one axis — autonomy, hosting, audit, signing, SBOM, sandbox, monorepo scale, CI touch — and states both sides on that axis. No feature checklist, no marketing re-framing.
Axis · autonomy scope
Them
Operates as a per-tab assistive agent inside the developer’s editor session; answers the prompt the developer types and edits the files in the active tab.
Driftlock
Acts only on overnight signals already in your stack (CI failure, Dependabot alert, CVE, on-call page); no goal, no run.
Axis · self-hosting
Them
Hosted product; the agent logic and the model calls run on Cursor’s infrastructure, with the developer’s local install acting as the UI surface.
Driftlock
Single Helm + Terraform deployment inside your VPC, behind your egress policy.
Axis · audit trail
Them
Audit lives in the chat and edit-history log on Cursor’s control plane; replay requires Cursor as the intermediary and does not natively separate the trigger, the sandbox hash, the SBOM hash, and the signature into discrete replayable columns.
Driftlock
Records seven per-PR columns (alert id, sandbox run hash, SBOM hash, approver chain, signature, diff bytes, triage verdict) replayable on your storage tier.
Axis · commit-signing
Them
Does not natively sign commits with a cosign key held in a customer KMS; commit identity follows the developer’s local git configuration.
Driftlock
Commits sign with your cosign key kept in your KMS or HSM; key rotation happens on your schedule.
Axis · SBOM
Them
Does not emit a per-PR SBOM as a first-class artifact; dependency review is delegated to the host repository’s tooling.
Driftlock
Emits an SBOM hash per PR, recorded alongside the diff and the signature so reviewers can diff two SBOMs without re-running the build.
Axis · sandbox execution
Them
Operates against the developer’s open editor session; there is no hermetic sandbox that pins the toolchain or replays the original regression before opening a PR.
Driftlock
Runs inside a hermetic sandbox that mounts the existing monorepo’s toolchain and test cache, and replays the original regression before opening the PR.
Axis · monorepo scale
Them
Optimised for editor-side assistance across many repositories and languages; large monorepos work but the in-IDE flow does not share the team’s existing build cache.
Driftlock
Built for one large monorepo per deployment; the sandbox mounts the monorepo’s existing caches so a CI rerun is bounded by what CI itself already proves.
Axis · CI touch
Them
May run the project’s tests as a developer-driven command but does not read CI failures as a primary engineering-signal trigger.
Driftlock
Treats CI as the source of truth — the agent reads CI failures as triggers and reruns the original regression inside the sandbox before opening the PR.
8 axes · posture-level · no feature checklist
FAQ
Questions comparison-stage buyers ask.
See it on your stack
Compare on a real monorepo, not a slide deck.
The architecture page names the four signal sources the watcher reads; the governance page enumerates the seven per-PR columns a regulator replays. Run the comparison against one of your real monorepos on a ten-day scoped trial — you'll see the diffs Driftlock ships and the audit trail your reviewers sign.