Coding · Head-to-head
Windsurf vs GLM-5.2
Windsurf (freemium, AI Score 7.2/10) vs GLM-5.2 (freemium, AI Score 8.5/10). 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.
Pick GLM-5.2 if…
- →overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 8.5 vs 7.2)
- →your primary use case is engineering teams building coding agents who need frontier-class capability under a license they fully control — self-hosted, fine-tuned, or air-gapped — rather than rented from a closed api.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Windsurf | GLM-5.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Coding | Coding |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Headline pricing | Free tier; paid plans from $20/mo (the Devin lineup now served at windsurf.com) — verify before buying | Free chat + MIT open weights; paid API and GLM Coding Plan — check site for current rates |
| 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. | Yes — free chat access plus MIT-licensed weights you can download and run at no license cost. Hosted API and Coding Plan rates are not stated here because they were not verified against z.ai on the date of this update; check the site directly before budgeting. |
| AI Score | 7.2/10 | 8.5/10 |
| 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. | Engineering teams building coding agents who need frontier-class capability under a license they fully control — self-hosted, fine-tuned, or air-gapped — rather than rented from a closed API. |
| Editor's pick | — | — |
| Use cases | development agents | development agents |
| Date added | 2025-06-01 | 2026-06-27 |
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
GLM-5.2
Coding · freemium
Pros
- ✓MIT license at 744B parameters — commercial use, fine-tuning and redistribution with no revocable API terms or MAU clause
- ✓1M-token context handles whole repositories and long agent histories in one pass
- ✓Tuned for long-horizon, multi-turn tool use rather than one-shot completion, which is the workload coding agents actually run
- ✓Self-hosting is a genuine option for teams with data-residency or air-gap requirements, not a theoretical one
- ✓Materially cheaper than closed frontier tiers like GPT-5.6 Sol at $5/$30 per million tokens
Cons
- ×744B parameters means serious multi-GPU hardware to self-host, so most teams end up on the hosted API anyway — back on someone else's terms
- ×The launch claim of beating GPT-5.5 on long-horizon coding was vendor- and press-reported and still has no independent replication; GPT-5.6 Sol shipped in July and moved the comparison point
- ×The cheap-frontier field caught up fast — Qwen 3.8 Max at $2/$6 and Kimi K3 at $3/$15 offer comparable context, so GLM-5.2's cost edge is no longer distinctive
- ×Hosted API and Coding Plan prices are not published in an easily comparable form, and some enterprises face data-residency or procurement blocks on a China-based provider
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.