Cursor officially launched the Cursor Marketplace, a dedicated hub for AI-native plugins. Released as part of the Cursor 2.5 update, this new ecosystem is designed to move beyond traditional VS Code extensions by bundling complex AI capabilities into a single, installable package.
Unlike a standard marketplace that just adds buttons to your UI, Cursor’s plugins are designed to provide the AI agent with “specialized brains” and direct access to external tools.
What’s Inside a Cursor Plugin?
A single plugin in the new marketplace can bundle several different AI primitives to make your assistant more capable:
- MCP Servers: Direct connections to external data sources (like your database or Jira).
- Skills: Specialized prompt instructions and “expert” code snippets for specific domains.
- Subagents: Dedicated agents that can work in the background on specialized tasks.
- Rules: Project-specific
.mdcfiles that enforce your team’s coding standards. - Hooks: Automated scripts that trigger when the agent performs certain actions.
Initial Launch Partners
Cursor launched with a curated set of “powerhouse” plugins that cover the entire product development lifecycle:
| Category | Featured Plugins | Capabilities |
| Infrastructure | AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel | Deploy services, estimate costs, and manage IaC directly from the editor. |
| Data & DB | Neon, Snowflake, Databricks | Branch Postgres databases or query production data using natural language. |
| Design | Figma | Translate visual designs into React/Tailwind code with native context. |
| Management | Linear, Slack, Notion | Create issues, sync documentation, or send progress updates to channels. |
| Payments | Stripe | Automatically build and test complex payment flows and webhooks. |
New Capabilities: Async Subagents & Sandboxes
Accompanying the marketplace are two critical “agentic” upgrades that make these plugins more powerful:
- Async Subagents: The parent agent no longer stalls while a subagent runs a test or a lint check. They now run in the background, allowing for parallelized, “tree-style” work on complex refactors.
- Sandbox Access Controls: Because plugins can now reach out to the internet, Cursor introduced fine-grained Egress Policies. You can define exactly which domains an agent can talk to (e.g., only
api.stripe.com) to prevent data leakage.
How to Get Started
You can browse the collection at cursor.com/marketplace or manage them directly within the IDE:
- Open the Command Palette (
Cmd+Shift+PorCtrl+Shift+P). - Type
/add-pluginto search and install directly. - Private Marketplaces: For enterprise teams, Cursor has teased that “Private Team Marketplaces” are coming later this quarter for internal governance and proprietary skills.
