Coding · Head-to-head
Cursor vs Windsurf
Cursor (freemium, AI Score 9.2/10) vs Windsurf (freemium, AI Score 7.2/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.
The verdict
Pick Cursor if…
- →overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 9.2 vs 7.2)
- →you want our editor's pick for this category
- →your primary use case is professional developers who want an ide-native agent that can also run in the cloud and be steered from a phone, and engineering teams that need admin control over which model handles which request.
Pick Windsurf if…
- →your primary use case is developers already productive in windsurf's cascade workflow who have no urgent reason to migrate, and teams evaluating cognition's stack who want an editor-side agent sitting alongside devin's cloud agents.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Cursor | Windsurf |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Coding | Coding |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Headline pricing | Free Hobby + Individual $20/mo + Teams $40/user/mo + Enterprise custom | Free tier; paid plans from $20/mo (the Devin lineup now served at windsurf.com) — verify before buying |
| Free tier | Free Hobby plan, no credit card required, with limited Agent requests and access to the Composer model. | Yes, but it is credit-metered and is Devin's free tier, not the unlimited-basic-completions-forever tier this entry once described. That tier no longer exists. Confirm current allowances on the live pricing page before relying on it. |
| AI Score | 9.2/10 | 7.2/10 |
| Best for | Professional developers who want an IDE-native agent that can also run in the cloud and be steered from a phone, and engineering teams that need admin control over which model handles which request. | Developers already productive in Windsurf's Cascade workflow who have no urgent reason to migrate, and teams evaluating Cognition's stack who want an editor-side agent sitting alongside Devin's cloud agents. |
| Editor's pick | ✓ Yes | — |
| Use cases | development agents | development agents |
| Date added | 2025-04-01 | 2025-06-01 |
Pros and cons
Cursor
Coding · freemium
Pros
- ✓Multi-file editing across an indexed codebase is still the category benchmark, handling imports and cross-file references without hand-holding
- ✓Agents run in the editor, in the cloud, or from an iOS app, so a long job does not need your laptop awake
- ✓Composer is a first-party agentic model, so Cursor is not purely a reseller of other labs' tokens
- ✓Cursor Router gives admins one lever on org-wide model spend plus control over which models are reachable, which matters for approved-model and data-residency rules
- ✓The free Hobby tier includes Composer access rather than gating the in-house model behind a card
Cons
- ×Pro+ and Ultra appear on the pricing page with 3x and 20x limit multipliers but no published price, so real cost above $20/mo is opaque until you are inside the product
- ×Usage-based limits replaced the old fixed request quotas, making monthly spend harder to predict than a flat seat fee
- ×Cursor Router is Teams and Enterprise only, so solo developers get none of the routing savings, and the 60% figure is Cursor's own A/B with Cost mode's quality tradeoff undocumented
- ×SpaceX's $60B acquisition of Anysphere leaves the product's independence and long-term branding unsettled
Windsurf
Coding · freemium
Pros
- ✓Cascade remains one of the better-designed agent loops: it plans, edits across files, runs commands, reads output and iterates without needing constant re-prompting
- ✓Repo-wide indexing means the agent locates the relevant files itself instead of making you paste context
- ✓Mixes cheap in-house SWE-series models for routine edits with frontier models for hard problems, so agent runs are not uniformly expensive
- ✓Enterprise self-hosted and air-gapped deployment with zero data retention, which Cursor does not offer at any tier
- ✓Full VS Code fork with terminal execution and file-write access, not a chat sidebar bolted onto an editor
Cons
- ×The founding team including CEO Varun Mohan left for Google DeepMind in July 2025 and Cognition bought what remained, so an independent product roadmap is not a safe assumption
- ×windsurf.com resolved to Cognition's Devin site when checked on 2026-08-10, meaning the plans a buyer actually encounters are Devin's and no Windsurf-branded price could be confirmed on any live page
- ×Cursor and Claude Code have caught up on multi-file agentic work, erasing the 2025 lead this entry's original 9.1 score was built on
- ×Pricing is credit-metered and hard to forecast for a team; the unlimited free tier that once made the product an easy recommendation is gone
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.