Coding · Head-to-head

Windsurf vs Codex Security CLI

Windsurf (freemium, AI Score 7.2/10) vs Codex Security CLI (free, AI Score 8/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.

The verdict

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.
→you need: agents

Try Windsurf →

Pick Codex Security CLI if…

→budget is the constraint
→overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 8 vs 7.2)
→your primary use case is platform and security engineers wiring a scanner into ci for a codebase that is increasingly ai-generated, who want a client they can read and pin rather than a closed vendor agent they have to trust.

Try Codex Security CLI →

Spec	Windsurf	Codex Security CLI
Category	Coding	Coding
Pricing model	freemium	free
Headline pricing	Free tier; paid plans from $20/mo (the Devin lineup now served at windsurf.com) — verify before buying	Free, open source; model-backed analysis bills through your existing Codex plan or API access — check OpenAI's current pricing
Free tier	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.	The CLI is free and open source. What costs money is model usage, which routes through your existing Codex plan or API access rather than through a separate purchase.
AI Score	7.2/10	8/10
Best for	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.	Platform and security engineers wiring a scanner into CI for a codebase that is increasingly AI-generated, who want a client they can read and pin rather than a closed vendor agent they have to trust.
Editor's pick	—	—
Use cases	development agents	development
Date added	2025-06-01	2026-07-29

Coding · freemium

✓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

×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

Coding · free

✓Genuinely open source — you can read the client, audit what it sends, fork it and pin a version rather than trusting a black-box security vendor
✓Carries findings across runs, so a scan returns a delta instead of the same wall of unranked issues on every build
✓Verifies that a fix actually closed the finding it targeted, which is what makes it viable as a CI gate rather than a report-only scanner
✓Model-based analysis can follow logic across files without someone first authoring a rule for that specific pattern
✓Free at the tool layer, putting real scanning in reach of teams shipping AI-generated code with no security budget

×Still early access two weeks after launch — the command surface and flags can churn, so pin a version before it gates a build
×The client is open but the judgment is not: the model that ranks a finding critical or noise is closed, and so is the eval set that defined "vulnerability"
×No independent benchmark or published false-positive rate since launch, so detection quality against Semgrep, Snyk or GitHub code scanning is unmeasured
×Same-vendor auditing — Codex writes the code and a Codex-branded tool grades it, with no public study on whether a same-family generator and auditor share blind spots

Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.