I tested Cursor vs Claude Code: One took 2 minutes, the other took 24
I did a speed comparison of Cursor’s new Composer model and Claude Code.
The idea was to
- Build a dashboard of football stats
- Connect to an API
- Display the stats
Then I used the same 122 line prompt for both Claude Code and Cursor.
First Up — Cursor
When Cursor said it was done I thought it was joking.
Yep, that’s 2 minutes and 26 seconds to build an entire application.
I actually couldn’t believe it so I went back through the chat thread to make sure it hadn’t missed something?
Nope, Cursor had created 10 To-dos for itself and finished them it that time.
The next test was to see if it all worked.
What the actual heck. I can’t believe how fast that was. Not only that but it did this all in one request.
It also managed to add the player API to get tthe count of goals.
It then added a graph at the bottom of the dashboard.
Meanwhile, after 2 minutes Claude Code hadn’t even finished thinking about what is was going to do.
17 minutes in and we had Claude Code tell us that it was ready.
Except none of the data loaded.
Then we would get long sleep time out errors like this, where nothing happened.
I had to intervene and give it the API documentation to which it bubbled away for 7 more minutes. In total I had to do 4 additional requests to Claude Code.
I persisted for science and finally after what felt like an extremely long 24 minutes we had matched Cursor.
It was literally 10 times slower than Cursor.
Here is what Claude Code came up with. To be fair it was nice and solid and looked great.
And it made a nice top scorers component.
Speed Check 2 — Adding an additional feature
I wanted to see how things compared once there was a codebase in place. So this time I asked them both to build a player profile.
Using the same prompt again.
Cursor went first and clocked in at under 1 minute.
Let’s see the results
All the data in there from a new API route in 53 seconds. The word game changing gets used a lot but the speed of this tool deserves that title. It completely changes AI coding.
Claude Code’s turn
Claude Code was much faster this time and did it in close to 4 minutes. So basically 4 times slower than Cursor.
The actual page it made did look a bit more polished and it had more detail.
It also had more statistics. I’m not a huge fan of all the icons that AI added and I quite like that Cursor didn’t do that.
Design overhaul test
This one was to basically overhaul and polish the whole site. I just asked them to both to polish the entire site.
Cursor came in at 1 minute.
Here is the results.
The polish was subtle but I quite liked it
I actual prefer slightly understated design so this was actually a good outcome for the test
It definitely made it look better but it wasn’t as drastic an update as Claude Code did.
Claude Code
So the pattern is clear, once Claude Code has got started it gets faster but it is still much slower than Cursor.
Still 2 minutes for a design overhaul is extremely quick.
Let’s see how it went with the actual design. Here is the player page.
Claude Code actually did a really good job at the main page and the styling in general, I quite like what it did here.
Conclusion
- Cursor is significantly faster — completing tasks in 1–3 minutes vs Claude Code’s 4–24 minutes
- Claude Code has longer thinking time —it may produce slightly more polished designs but it requires way more time
- Speed difference reduces after initial setup — Claude Code gets faster (4x vs 10x slower) once the base is established
- Design quality varies — Claude Code may produce better-looking results with more detail, while Cursor focuses on speed
The thing that surprised me about this test is that Claude Code was worse at solving the API problems. Not only was Composer faster it was more accurate and had no build errors.
Here’s what this actually means:
If you’re starting a new project, use Cursor Composer. The speed advantage is absurd and it handles API integration better.
If you’re already deep in a Claude Code project, you can stay there, it does get faster after the initial setup. But knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t start anything new in Claude Code.
The gap is just too big. 2.5 minutes vs 24 minutes is just ridiculous. It’s not even the same category of tool at that point.
Written by Chris Dunlop
https://medium.com/@chrisdunlop_37984
I’ll help you code with AI. Cursor tips & Business Strategy. I run a company doing AI for the All Blacks, Olympic Team & the Stock Exchange www.cubdigital.co.nz