Coding · Head-to-head
Windsurf vs Cody
Windsurf (freemium, AI Score 7.2/10) vs Cody (paid, AI Score 6.4/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.
The verdict
Pick Windsurf if…
- →you need a genuinely free option
- →budget is the constraint
- →overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 7.2 vs 6.4)
- →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.
Pick Cody if…
- →your primary use case is platform and developer-experience teams at large organisations already running sourcegraph, who need repo-wide ai answers under their own permission model and cloud-hosted inference.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Windsurf | Cody |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Coding | Coding |
| Pricing model | freemium | paid |
| Headline pricing | Free tier; paid plans from $20/mo (the Devin lineup now served at windsurf.com) — verify before buying | Enterprise only — check website for 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. | — |
| AI Score | 7.2/10 | 6.4/10 |
| 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 developer-experience teams at large organisations already running Sourcegraph, who need repo-wide AI answers under their own permission model and cloud-hosted inference. |
| Editor's pick | — | — |
| Use cases | development agents | development |
| Date added | 2025-06-01 | 2026-05-01 |
Pros and cons
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
Cody
Coding · paid
Pros
- ✓Context comes from a real code-search index rather than a bolted-on vector store, so cross-repository answers cite actual definitions and references
- ✓Model routing through Amazon Bedrock or Azure OpenAI keeps inference inside your own cloud account — a hard requirement in regulated environments
- ✓Inherits Sourcegraph repository permissions, so it cannot surface code a user isn't cleared to see
- ✓Self-hosted and air-gapped deployment options that most AI coding assistants simply do not offer
- ✓Adds AI on top of an installation many large engineering orgs already run, rather than introducing a new vendor
Cons
- ×The self-serve Free and Pro tiers were retired in 2025 — individual developers can no longer buy this, which is a major change from earlier reviews
- ×Sourcegraph's agentic coding investment moved to Amp, so Cody no longer receives the company's headline feature work
- ×No autonomous multi-file agent loop comparable to Cursor, Claude Code, or Sourcegraph's own Amp
- ×Requires a Sourcegraph deployment and index before it delivers its one differentiator — a heavy prerequisite if you aren't already a customer
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.