GitHub Stacked PRs vs Graphite vs Cursor Origin (2026)

Stacked pull requests went from a niche workflow to a three-way race in under a year. Graphite sold stacking as a product, Cursor acquired Graphite in December 2025 and set the team building Origin, and in April 2026 GitHub answered with a native Stacked PRs preview of its own. The core idea is identical everywhere. What differs is who can actually use each one today, what it costs, and how much you commit to by adopting it.

GitHub's Stacked PRs entered private preview in mid-April 2026, per coverage in InfoQ and The Register. GitHub's own preview page says plainly that the feature stays off until GitHub enables it for your repository, behind a waitlist. Once it is on, the mechanics are the interesting part, because GitHub built stacks into the pull request model itself rather than bolting a tool on top.

• Each PR in the stack targets the branch of the PR below it, forming an ordered chain that lands on your default branch.
• The pull request view shows a stack map, so reviewers can move between layers without losing their place.
• CI runs for every PR as if it targeted the final branch, and branch protection is enforced against that final target, not just the direct base.
• Merging the top PR merges every unmerged PR below it in one atomic operation. Merging part of a stack automatically rebases what remains.

Tooling is optional. GitHub ships a stack CLI as the gh-stack extension, with gs commands (gs init starts a stack, gs add creates a new layer, gs submit opens the pull requests) that handle branching, cascading rebases and PR creation. Stacks can also be built straight through the UI or API. The launch coverage circulated one number worth keeping: an analysis of 1.5 million pull requests found PRs between 200 and 400 lines carried 40% fewer defects and were approved roughly three times faster than larger ones, which is the whole case for stacking in two statistics.

Cursor announced a definitive agreement to acquire Graphite on December 19, 2025, and Graphite has kept operating as an independent product since. Its own announcement promised tighter integration with Cursor through 2026 rather than a wind-down. Practically, Graphite remains what it was: the most mature stacking workflow you can adopt today, run through the gt CLI against a normal GitHub repo.

Four commands carry most of the workflow, and they map onto how you would build a feature in dependent pieces.

Pricing is per user. The free Hobby tier covers personal repos, the CLI, the VS Code extension and limited AI reviews. Starter at $20 per user per month adds organization repos and Slack notifications. Team at $40 adds unlimited AI reviews, automations and the merge queue, and Enterprise adds SAMLAn enterprise standard that powers single sign-on. Press Enter for the full definition., audit logging and GHES support at custom pricing. All paid figures are annual billing, per graphite.com/pricing.

Origin is Cursor's own git hosting platform, announced June 16, 2026 at the Compile event and demoed by Graphite co-founder Tomas Reimers. It is built inside Cursor by the Graphite team, and that lineage is nearly all we can say about its review layer, because cursor.com/origin is a waitlist page: no feature list, no pricing, no release date. Cursor's tagline pitches it as a git forge for the agent era, and the page stops there.

Inherited stacking, then, means this: the team building Origin shipped stacked review in production for years at Graphite, so stacked diffs are the single strongest expectation about how Origin's review works. The stacked diffs guide covers that model in detail, and the Graphite acquisition explains how the team got there. Expectation is the right word for both.

No clean sweep exists here. Each option wins a real case and loses another, so the honest way to choose is by constraint: what you can access, what you can spend, and how much vendor commitment you can tolerate.

Lock-in runs in a clear order. GitHub's native stacks add nothing beyond GitHub itself. Graphite adds a layer you can drop, since your pull requests remain plain GitHub PRs underneath. Origin replaces the host, which is the biggest commitment a team can make in this category. Adopt in that order of caution, and if you want the fuller custody argument, the Origin vs GitHub comparison walks through it.