Cursor vs Windsurf (Devin Desktop): Our Verdict
Two AI-first editors, now priced identically at $20 a month. One is a VS Code fork tuned for the developer editing next to the model; the other is a cross-IDE agent hub with a Devin cloud handoff. We tested both to settle which one most working developers should pay for.
We recommend Cursor for the developer who lives in an editor all day. Its autocomplete is still the fastest and most accurate we tested, and its in-editor agent stack is the most polished. Windsurf, rebranded as Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026, is the pick for teams tied to JetBrains or other non-VS Code editors, for shops that want a first-class handoff to Cognition's Devin cloud agents, and for regulated buyers who need its compliance shelf.
A year ago this was the easy comparison: $15 versus $20, one autocomplete-first, one agent-first. That framing is gone. Windsurf raised Pro to $20 in March and matched Cursor at $40/user Teams and $200 top-tier. Cognition then rebranded the editor to Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026, with the old Cascade agent scheduled to retire on July 1, 2026 in favor of a new Devin Local agent and an "Agent Command Center" that dispatches long-running work to Devin's cloud VMs. Cursor, for its part, has settled into a five-tier credit-pool model (Hobby, Pro, Pro+, Ultra, Teams) with unlimited Auto mode as the workhorse and its own Composer model handling tactical edits.
We tested both on the same production work and judged them round by round. Each round names a winner and states the concrete procedure we used to pick it.
Cursor's Tab completion is still the fastest and most accurate inline model we tested. Independent benchmarks put its acceptance rate near 72% on real projects, several points ahead of Windsurf's Supercomplete, and the gap is visible within an hour of typing. Windsurf's Tab is competitive and unlimited on every plan including Free (it never touches the quota), but on pure typing-flow autocomplete, Cursor is the one that disappears into the workflow.
How we tested itWe typed the same set of routine tasks in TypeScript, Python, and Go in each editor — adding handlers, writing tests, filling in obvious boilerplate — and tracked how often the first suggestion was accepted without edits, using independent acceptance-rate figures as a cross-check.
Windsurf's Cascade, and its replacement Devin Local, plans longer sequences with explicit verification steps and self-corrects on failure. The design borrows heavily from the Devin agent. It reached an acceptable multi-file diff in fewer attempts on the greenfield tasks in our runs, and its Wave 13 parallel-agent support (multiple Cascade instances using Git worktrees) let us farm out independent branches without stepping on each other. Cursor's Composer and Background Agents are strong on tighter, surgical edits, but on longer-horizon autonomous work Windsurf's lineage shows.
How we tested itWe gave each editor five real refactors on a 50K-line repo: renaming a pattern across files, updating an API contract, lifting a component, extracting strings to i18n keys, and changing a shared type. We counted the attempts needed to land an acceptable diff, then repeated on a greenfield feature build.
Windsurf ships plugins for 40+ IDEs, including JetBrains (IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm), Vim, Neovim, and Xcode. Cursor is a VS Code fork; adopting it means switching editors, which is a real cost for anyone tied to JetBrains or a heavily-customized VS Code install. The JetBrains Windsurf plugin doesn't mirror the full Agent Command Center, but the core AI experience travels with the developer instead of forcing an editor change.
How we tested itWe installed each product everywhere it ships and noted whether the full feature set (Tab autocomplete, chat, agent) was available in each editor on the developer's existing setup.
Cognition's SWE-1.5 (and its successor SWE-1.6) is positioned as a Sonnet-class coding model at roughly 1,300 tokens per second (the vendor's cited figure) versus Sonnet 4.5 at roughly 100 tokens per second, and it's included unlimited on Pro. Combined with the new Devin cloud handoff, Windsurf lets a developer plan a task locally, dispatch it to a Devin cloud VM, and review the result back in the editor. Cursor's Composer is fast and tightly wired into its diff system, but it does not currently ship an equivalent to Devin Cloud for long-running autonomous jobs.
How we tested itWe ran the same agentic tasks against each vendor's in-house coding model (Cursor's Composer, Windsurf's SWE-1.5 / SWE-1.6) and tried the Devin cloud handoff from Windsurf on a long-running refactor to see whether the local-plan-to-cloud-execute loop actually worked end-to-end.
At the door the two are identical: Pro is $20/month on both, Teams is $40/user, and each vendor's top individual tier is $200/month. The difference is metering. Cursor's Pro plan bundles a $20 monthly credit pool for premium models, and Auto mode (where Cursor picks a cost-efficient model) is unlimited and doesn't draw from that pool, so a developer can sprint hard on a Friday without waiting for a reset. Windsurf replaced credits with daily and weekly quotas on March 19, 2026; hit the daily cap and you wait until tomorrow. For variable workloads, Cursor's model is the more forgiving one.
How we tested itWe priced a month of normal use on each vendor's individual paid plan, then re-priced a heavy agentic week to see how the credit pool and the quota system behaved when the workload spiked.
Windsurf publishes SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, FedRAMP High, and ITAR alongside SSO, RBAC, and hybrid deployment on its enterprise tier. Cursor Enterprise adds pooled usage, SCIM seat management, audit logs, and org-wide privacy mode, but its public compliance surface is narrower. For a healthcare, defense, or federal buyer, Windsurf is the safer procurement conversation today.
How we tested itWe compared the published enterprise shelf — SSO, RBAC, deployment options, and named compliance certifications — against the checklist a regulated buyer actually has to satisfy.
Where the verdict turned
Cursor and Windsurf answer the same question (how should the model live inside the editor?) in opposite ways, and the answers have moved apart, not together, in 2026. Under identical price tags, these tools make fundamentally different bets about what developers need. Cursor bets on speed, familiarity, and the best autocomplete on the market. Windsurf bets on IDE freedom, enterprise compliance, and a proprietary model that could change the economics of AI-assisted coding.
Cursor took the rounds most professional developers feel every hour: inline autocomplete and pricing predictability. Windsurf took the rounds that decide procurement and long-horizon work: multi-IDE reach, the Devin cloud handoff, and enterprise compliance. Neither editor is a bad buy at $20 a month. They’re optimized for different jobs.
What changed in 2026
Anyone choosing between these tools today is choosing across a set of structural shifts, not just a feature list.
Start with ownership. Both tools went through significant changes in late 2025 and early 2026. Windsurf rebranded from Codeium in April 2025 and was acquired by Cognition AI, the makers of Devin, in December 2025 for roughly $250M. The acquisition matters because Cognition is folding Devin’s autonomous coding agent into Windsurf’s IDE, accelerating Windsurf’s agent-first direction. On June 2, 2026, Cognition rebranded Windsurf again, this time to Devin Desktop. Two VS Code forks now dominate the AI IDE conversation: Cursor from Anysphere, and Windsurf, now Devin Desktop, from Cognition.
The windsurf.com domain still resolves, but the canonical home is devin.ai/desktop. Cascade, the in-editor agent loop, retires July 1, 2026, replaced by the Agent Command Center that orchestrates Devin Cloud agents from the editor.
On the pricing side, the old $5 gap is gone. As of March 19, 2026, Windsurf replaced its credit-based pricing with a quota system and moved Pro to $20/month, identical to Cursor Pro. Teams went to $40/seat and a new Max tier launched at $200/month. Windsurf retired credits entirely and replaced them with daily and weekly quotas.
Cursor’s pricing is now a five-tier credit-pool model. Cursor costs $0 to $200 per month across five individual and team tiers: Hobby at $0, Pro at $20 per month, Pro+ at $60 per month, Ultra at $200 per month, and Teams at $40 per user/month, per the official pricing page. The model runs on three simple rules. You pick a plan with a fixed monthly price. That plan includes a credit pool equal in dollars to your subscription. Auto mode is unlimited and doesn’t burn credits at all. Only manual selection of premium frontier models, or Max mode, pulls from your credit pool.
Where each editor is stronger
Autocomplete. Cursor’s inline model is still the fastest we tested. Cursor’s supermaven-derived Tab hits a 72% acceptance rate, the highest we’ve measured in any AI IDE. Engineers doing tight typing-flow work feel the difference within an hour. Windsurf’s Supercomplete is solid but consistently 5-10% behind on acceptance rate in independent tests. Windsurf does keep Tab completions unlimited on every tier, which matters at the free-tier margin. Tab completions never touch your quota; only Cascade and Chat with premium models draw from your daily/weekly allowance.
Long-horizon agent work. This is where Windsurf’s Cognition lineage shows. Cascade is a single, deeply integrated agentic surface that reads your project structure, plans a sequence of edits, executes commands in the integrated terminal, and self-corrects on failure. With the Wave 13 release in early 2026, Windsurf added parallel agent sessions: you can run multiple Cascade instances simultaneously, each working on a different part of your codebase with dedicated terminal profiles. Cascade also ships “Cascade Hooks,” pre- and post-action triggers for enforcing coding standards, running linters, or executing custom scripts. After the rebrand, the Agent Command Center is a Kanban view that surfaces every local and cloud agent in one place (Running, Waiting for Review, Done). Any ACP-compatible agent can run inside Devin Desktop, and Devin agents can run inside other ACP editors.
Proprietary model. Windsurf SWE-1.5, announced in March 2026, is positioned as a Sonnet-class coding model with dramatically higher throughput. Cognition publishes a figure of roughly 1,300 tokens per second versus Sonnet 4.5’s roughly 100 tokens per second, a 13x speedup, while claiming near-parity accuracy on internal coding evaluations. SWE-1.6 is Cognition’s current free proprietary coding model, succeeding SWE-1.5, with near-frontier quality at fast inference. Fast Context, via SWE-grep, retrieves relevant code in milliseconds through parallel tool calls.
IDE reach. This is the cleanest advantage Windsurf holds. Windsurf ships plugins for 40+ IDEs including JetBrains, Vim, NeoVim, and Xcode, while Cursor keeps you inside Cursor, its VS Code fork. Both support MCP, but only Windsurf offers admin controls for enterprise requirements. Cursor’s own answer is feature parity with VS Code: every extension, every keyboard shortcut, every theme works, and switching back to vanilla VS Code is one config change away. Windsurf is a separate IDE, its extension ecosystem is smaller, and its keyboard shortcuts differ.
Compliance. For enterprise, both offer custom pricing, but Windsurf adds SSO, RBAC, hybrid deployment, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and FedRAMP High. That’s the security infrastructure regulated industries actually need. Cursor Enterprise covers pooled usage, SCIM, audit logs, and org-wide privacy controls, but does not publish the same certification list.
What Cursor still owns
Cursor has been executing hard on the agentic stack it already had inside the editor. Bugbot auto-reviews PRs. You can run up to 8 parallel agents in Git worktrees. Auto mode remains its quietest pricing advantage: on paid plans, unlimited Auto usage means routine work doesn’t touch the credit pool. Use Auto mode whenever possible; it picks a cost-efficient model for your task, doesn’t draw from your monthly credit pool, and should be your default for routine completions and simple code generation.
For a Cursor-heavy team, Anysphere also split Teams into two seat classes in mid-2026. Teams seat usage now splits into two separate pools: one for Composer and Auto (first-party Cursor models), and one for third-party API models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, and so on). Every Standard seat gets significantly more total usage at the same $40/month price. Cursor also introduced a new Premium seat, 5x the usage of Standard at 3x the cost ($120/month), for power users running heavy agent workloads. Teams can mix Standard and Premium seats freely.
Who should buy which
Choose Cursor if you live in VS Code, care about inline speed above all else, and want the tightest, most polished autocomplete-plus-agent loop on the market. The credit-pool model with unlimited Auto mode is more forgiving for variable workloads, and Composer and Background Agents are the state of the art for surgical, in-editor work. This is our recommendation for most working engineers.
Choose Windsurf (Devin Desktop) if any of the following are true: your team is on JetBrains, Neovim, Xcode, or another non-VS Code editor and switching is not on the table; you want a first-class handoff from local planning to Devin cloud agents for long-running autonomous work; or you are a regulated buyer who needs HIPAA, FedRAMP High, or ITAR on the shelf. SWE-1.6 and Fast Context cut latency on the typical edit, and the Agent Command Center hands long tasks to Devin without leaving the editor. That’s the new post-rebrand value lever.
At price parity, this is no longer a question of cost. It’s a question of which editor’s opinion about how developers should work in 2026 matches your team’s. For most working engineers today, that’s Cursor. For teams that need to leave VS Code, hand work off to Devin, or answer a procurement questionnaire, it’s Windsurf.