Comparison

Vixl is a local-first BYOK desktop app: no Vixl account, keys stay on your machine, and you pay the model host you configured. The origin story is on Philosophy.

Pricing and model catalogs change often. Use each vendor's own pages for current plans: GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Google Antigravity.

	Vixl	VS Code + GitHub Copilot	Cursor	Google Antigravity
License	MIT	vscode source is MIT. The shipped VS Code binary uses a Microsoft product license. Copilot is commercial.	Proprietary	Proprietary
Account required	No	GitHub account for Copilot	Cursor account	Google account
BYOK	Yes. Keys stay in the OS keychain and are sent only to the host you configured.	Yes for Chat. See VS Code BYOK.	Yes for listed chat providers. The key is sent to Cursor's backend with every request for prompt building. Tab completion always uses Cursor models. Zero Data Retention does not apply to BYOK. See Cursor API keys.	No. Official docs: no bring-your-own-key or bring-your-own-endpoint. See Antigravity plans.
Local models	Yes. Ollama and other local OpenAI-compatible hosts, with no account.	Documented for Chat. See VS Code language models.	AI requests are routed through Cursor's servers, including BYOK.	Not documented as a first-party local provider.
Where keys are sent	Directly to the provider URL you configured. There is no Vixl backend.	Copilot traffic goes to GitHub. BYOK is described in Microsoft's docs.	Cursor's backend, then the provider. The key is not stored on Cursor's servers after the request.	Google. There is no BYOK path.
MCP transports	stdio, http, and sse.	stdio and HTTP. See VS Code MCP.	stdio, SSE, and Streamable HTTP. See Cursor MCP.	stdio, Streamable HTTP, and SSE. See Antigravity MCP.
Plans persisted	Yes. Plan files live under `.vixl/plans/`. See Work with plans.	See vendor docs.	See vendor docs.	See vendor docs.

See FAQ.