Windsurf vs Cursor — AI Code Editor Comparison

Windsurf does not exist anymore, at least not under that name. On June 2, 2026, Cognition — the company behind the autonomous coding agent Devin — rebranded Windsurf as Devin Desktop, folding the editor you may have installed a year ago into a broader "agent command center" built around Devin. Cursor, meanwhile, spent the same twelve months going from a $9 billion startup to a company SpaceX paid $10 billion for exclusive access rights to, at a $60 billion valuation. This guide explains what changed, what stayed the same, and which editor actually fits the way you write code today.

If this is your first exposure to AI-assisted coding, start with our vibe coding explainer and our deep dive on Cursor before you dig into the comparison below.

What happened to Windsurf

To understand where Windsurf/Devin Desktop stands today, you need the chaotic 2025 backstory, because it explains why the product looks and prices the way it does now.

Windsurf began life as Codeium, a code-completion company founded in 2021. In November 2024, Codeium repackaged its technology into a standalone VS Code fork called Windsurf, built around a flagship multi-file agent named Cascade. The product grew fast enough that by mid-2025, OpenAI had agreed to acquire it for roughly $3 billion — reportedly its largest acquisition ever at the time (DevOps.com).

The OpenAI deal collapsed. Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor and partner, objected to intellectual property and exclusivity terms tied to its existing OpenAI agreement, and the acquisition fell through before it closed (techfundingnews.com). What followed has been described as a 72-hour scramble: Google DeepMind stepped in first, acquihiring Windsurf's CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and a group of senior engineers, plus a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf's technology, in a deal reported at $2.4 billion (CNBC). With the leadership gone, Cognition — maker of the autonomous software engineer Devin — then acquired what remained: the IP, the product, the brand, and the roughly 210 employees still at the company (InfoWorld). The exact price Cognition paid was not disclosed, though it was reported to be well below Windsurf's earlier $2.85 billion valuation.

In a single week in July 2025, Windsurf's product, its founding team, and its intellectual property were split across three separate companies — OpenAI (deal cancelled), Google DeepMind (talent), and Cognition (everything else). Almost a year later, on June 2, 2026, Cognition retired the Windsurf name entirely and shipped the product as Devin Desktop.

Cognition spent the following months integrating Windsurf's editor with Devin, its cloud-based autonomous agent, rather than running them as separate products. The result, Devin Desktop, launched on June 2, 2026. Anyone who had Windsurf installed and restarted the editor after that date received Devin Desktop automatically, keeping their existing account, plan, and settings intact (Devin blog). For more on the agent itself, see what Devin is and how the AI software engineer works.

For the rest of this article, "Windsurf" refers to the historical product and "Devin Desktop" to what it became. Because most developers who remember "Windsurf vs Cursor" as a comparison are really asking "should I use the Windsurf successor or Cursor," we cover Devin Desktop as the current answer to that question.

Definitions

Before comparing features, it helps to know who actually makes each product and what they are optimizing for.

• Cursor is an AI-first code editor built by Anysphere, founded in 2022 by Aman Sanger and Michael Truell. First released in 2023 as a Visual Studio Code fork, Cursor wraps AI features — Tab autocomplete, inline edit, a multi-file agent, and codebase-aware chat — around a familiar editor shell.
• Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf) is Cognition's editor, descended from Codeium's original VS Code fork. It now ships alongside Devin, Cognition's cloud-hosted autonomous agent that can pick up a Jira ticket, write code, open a pull request, and respond to review comments with minimal human input.

The two products started from a similar premise — take VS Code, bolt on an agent — but they have diverged. Cursor has doubled down on being an editor with an increasingly capable in-house model. Cognition has repositioned Devin Desktop as the local front-end for a broader agent-orchestration platform, where the editor is one surface among several (desktop, cloud, Slack, GitHub) for managing Devin's work.

The signature agents: Composer 2.5 vs Devin Local

The cleanest way to compare the two products is to look at their flagship multi-file coding agents, since that is where almost all of the daily work happens.

Cursor's Composer launched in September 2024 as a way to describe a change — "add dark mode," "migrate this endpoint to async" — and have Cursor plan and apply edits across multiple files, presenting one combined diff to accept or reject. Cursor kept iterating on Composer as a wrapper around third-party models (GPT, Claude, Gemini) until May 18, 2026, when it shipped Composer 2.5, its third-generation in-house coding model built on top of Moonshot AI's open Kimi K2.5 checkpoint (Beyond Tomorrow). On SWE-Bench Multilingual, a benchmark that measures whether a model can resolve real GitHub issues across multiple programming languages, Composer 2.5 scored 79.8%, close behind Claude Opus 4.7's 80.5% (TechTimes). On Cursor's own internal benchmark, CursorBench v3.1, Composer 2.5 actually edged ahead of Opus 4.7 (63.2% versus 61.6%) and GPT-5.5 (59.2%) — while costing roughly $0.50 per task compared to about $7 for Opus 4.7 at similar accuracy (DataCamp).

That cost gap matters more than it sounds. If Composer 2.5 is "good enough" for the bulk of routine multi-file edits, Cursor can route most agent requests through its own cheap model and reserve frontier models like Opus or GPT-5.5 for the hard cases — the same way a hospital triages patients rather than sending everyone straight to a specialist.

Devin Desktop's local agent replaced Cascade entirely at the June 2026 rebrand. The new agent, called Devin Local, was rewritten from scratch in Rust (a systems programming language chosen for memory safety and speed) and is roughly 30% more token-efficient than Cascade, according to Cognition, meaning it uses fewer tokens — and therefore less quota or money — to complete comparable tasks. Devin Local can also spawn subagents to work on parts of a task in parallel, similar to how a general contractor might split a renovation across an electrician and a plumber working at the same time rather than one after another (apidog.com).

The bigger structural change is what Cognition calls the Agent Command Center: a Kanban-style board inside Devin Desktop that shows every agent you are running — local, in Devin Local, or cloud, in Devin proper — sorted by status: in progress, blocked, ready for review. Instead of one chat window per file change, you get a queue of parallel work items, closer to how a manager tracks a team's tickets than how a single developer tracks their own cursor position. Cognition also introduced Spaces, which group related agent sessions, pull requests, and files around a feature branch so that multiple agents working on the same feature share context instead of each starting from zero.

Which agent handles a large refactor better?

Composer 2.5 is tuned for interactive, in-editor multi-file edits with a human reviewing every diff, which suits refactors where you want to steer along the way. Devin Local and cloud Devin are built for tasks you can hand off and check on later, including refactors spanning dozens of files, because Devin's subagents and Spaces are explicitly designed for parallel, semi-autonomous work.

Side-by-side comparison

Feature	Cursor	Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf)
Vendor	Anysphere	Cognition (via Codeium → Google DeepMind talent split → Cognition acquisition)
Launched	2023	November 2024 as Windsurf; rebranded June 2, 2026
Base editor	VS Code fork	VS Code fork
Flagship agent	Composer 2.5 (in-house, built on Kimi K2.5)	Devin Local (in-house, Rust-based) + cloud Devin
Tab autocomplete	Cursor Tab (multi-line, multi-file)	Supercomplete
Inline edit	Cmd+K	Cmd+I
Agent orchestration view	Single agent thread per task	Agent Command Center (Kanban across local + cloud agents)
Shared context between sessions	Project-level .cursor/rules	Spaces (per-feature context groups)
Interop protocol	MCP (Model Context Protocol)	MCP + Agent Client Protocol (ACP)
Project rules file	.cursor/rules	.windsurfrules (legacy)
Terminal-running agent	Agent mode	Devin Local + cloud Devin
Third-party models	GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7/Sonnet, Gemini	Same set, routed through Cognition's infrastructure
SWE-Bench Multilingual (in-house model)	79.8% (Composer 2.5)	Not independently published at time of writing
Individual entry price	Free (Hobby)	Free
Individual paid tier	Pro $20/month	Pro $20/month (raised from $15 in March 2026)
Mid tier	Pro+ $60/month	Pro Plus, reported around $35/month
Top individual tier	Ultra $200/month	Max $200/month
Team pricing	Teams $40/user/month	Teams $40/user/month
2026 valuation / deal	$60B (SpaceX $10B exclusivity + buyout option, April 2026)	Not disclosed post-acquisition

Table: Cursor vs Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf) feature and pricing comparison, as of July 2026.

Pricing, in detail

Pricing on both sides changed enough in 2026 that the old "Windsurf is $5 cheaper" story is out of date.

Cursor's current structure has six tiers. Hobby is free with limited Tab completions and agent requests. Pro is $20 per month and includes extended agent requests, access to frontier models, MCP support, cloud agents, and a $20 monthly credit pool applied against usage. Pro+ is $60 per month for three times the usage credits, and Ultra is $200 per month for twenty times the usage with priority access to new features. Teams runs $40 per user per month with centralized billing, SSO, and admin controls, and Enterprise is custom-priced with pooled usage across an organization (CloudZero). Annual billing saves roughly 20% across the paid tiers.

Devin Desktop's pricing underwent a structural overhaul on March 19, 2026: Cognition retired the older credit-based system in favor of daily and weekly usage quotas, and raised the individual Pro tier from $15 to $20 per month in the process. A new $200-per-month Max tier was introduced alongside it, putting the top individual tier at price parity with Cursor Ultra. Some sources still describe an intermediate Pro Plus tier around $35 per month with priority access to flagship models, though reporting on exact tier names has been inconsistent since the rebrand (Verdent, pecollective.com).

The practical upshot: the price gap that used to favor Windsurf by $5 a month has closed. Both editors now start free, both charge $20 for the standard individual paid tier, and both cap out around $200 for power users. If you were picking based on price alone in 2025, that reasoning no longer applies in 2026.

The single most consequential thing to know if you still have "Windsurf" installed: restarting the app now gives you Devin Desktop automatically, with a materially different interface built around managing multiple agents rather than a single chat thread.

Models and performance

Both editors are largely model-agnostic on top of their in-house options, meaning you can route requests to major third-party providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — in addition to each company's own model. Cursor's Composer 2.5 is the newer story here: an in-house model trained specifically for agentic coding tasks that now competes with frontier general-purpose models at a fraction of the inference cost, according to Cursor's own published benchmarks (Handy AI). Cognition has not published an equivalent independent benchmark comparison for Devin Local as of this writing, which makes a head-to-head performance claim for the local agent premature; what is well documented is the architectural change (Rust rewrite, subagent support) rather than a specific accuracy number.

On adoption, the two companies are no longer neck-and-neck the way they were in 2024. Cursor's revenue hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in January 2025, crossed $1 billion by November 2025, and passed $2 billion by February 2026 — one of the fastest revenue ramps recorded for an application-layer software company (teahose.com). In developer surveys from early 2026, Cursor sat around 18 to 24% of developers naming it their primary coding tool, trailing GitHub Copilot's workplace adoption of 29% and running close to Claude Code, depending on how the survey framed the question (andrew.ooo market share report). No comparably detailed, independently sourced adoption figures for Devin Desktop specifically were available at the time of writing, since the product only shipped under that name in June 2026 — any Windsurf-era adoption numbers predate the rebrand and the underlying product changes, so they should not be read as current.

For overall context on how these benchmarks are constructed and what they do and do not measure, see our explainer on LLM evaluations.

Why the agent-orchestration shift matters

The deeper story under the pricing and benchmark numbers is a philosophical split in what "AI code editor" means.

Cursor is still, at its core, a single-player tool: one developer, one editor window, one agent thread at a time, with Composer proposing a diff you review before it lands. That model rewards precision — Composer 2.5's cost advantage exists specifically because Cursor can afford to run it on every routine request and reserve pricier frontier models for genuinely hard problems.

Devin Desktop, after the rebrand, is closer to a team-lead's dashboard. The Agent Command Center treats coding work as a queue of tickets moving through states — in progress, blocked, ready for review — much like a project manager's board, except the workers are AI agents instead of engineers. Spaces exist because Cognition assumes multiple agents will touch the same feature branch over time and need shared memory of what has already been tried. This is a genuinely different mental model of software development: less "I am writing code with AI assistance" and more "I am supervising a small team of AI agents that write code."

Neither approach is objectively better. A solo developer or small team doing tightly scoped feature work will likely find Cursor's single-thread, high-precision workflow faster to reason about. A team already running larger, more parallelizable workstreams — multiple tickets, multiple branches, work that can proceed unattended for stretches — is closer to what Cognition built Devin Desktop for.

Do both editors support MCP?

Yes. Both Cursor and Devin Desktop support Model Context Protocol, Anthropic's open standard for connecting AI models to external tools and data sources, letting you plug in databases, ticketing systems, or internal APIs. Devin Desktop additionally supports the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), an open-source standard that lets any ACP-compatible agent run inside any ACP-compatible editor — a step toward agents and editors becoming interchangeable rather than tightly coupled.

Can I still use the old Windsurf name or interface?

No. Cognition auto-updated existing installs starting June 2, 2026; restarting the app replaces the Windsurf interface with Devin Desktop while preserving your account, plan, extensions, and keybindings. There is no supported way to stay on the legacy Windsurf/Cascade interface going forward (Devin blog).

Open-source alternatives

If a subscription IDE is not what you want, you can get much of the agentic experience for free by bringing your own API key to an open-source tool instead.

• Cline — an open-source VS Code extension that replicates Composer- or Devin Local-style multi-file editing, with you supplying the model API key.
• Continue.dev — an open-source AI assistant that works across VS Code and JetBrains IDEs.
• aider — a terminal-based AI pair programmer that edits files directly from the command line.
• Claude Code — Anthropic's official terminal-first coding agent, useful if you want an agentic workflow without committing to either editor's ecosystem.

These trade the polish of a managed product — auto-updates, a built-in UI for reviewing diffs, first-party support — for lower cost and more control over which model runs your code.

What people get wrong about this comparison

The most common mistake is treating "Windsurf vs Cursor" as a stable, evergreen comparison, the way you might compare two long-established text editors. It is not. In the space of thirteen months, Windsurf changed owners twice, lost its founding team to a competitor, was renamed, and had its flagship agent rewritten in a different programming language. Any article, video, or forum thread about "Windsurf" published before June 2026 is describing a product that, strictly speaking, no longer exists in that form.

A second common error is assuming price is still the deciding factor. It was a reasonable heuristic in 2025, when Windsurf Pro really did undercut Cursor Pro by $5 a month. After the March 2026 pricing overhaul, both products charge the same $20 for their standard individual tier and the same $200 for their top individual tier, so price no longer meaningfully separates them.

A third mistake is comparing the two editors purely on autocomplete or single-file edit quality, which is where they started in 2023 to 2024 but is no longer where the meaningful differentiation lives. The real divergence now is architectural: Cursor optimizing a single high-precision agent thread around its own increasingly capable in-house model, versus Cognition building a multi-agent orchestration layer where the editor is one interface into a larger system that also includes a cloud-hosted autonomous engineer. Judging either product only on how well it autocompletes a function signature misses most of what changed.

Decision framework

Pick Cursor if:

• You want a single, high-precision agent thread where you review every diff before it lands, rather than a queue of semi-autonomous agents.
• You want the strongest in-house coding model economics — Composer 2.5's roughly $0.50-per-task cost on Cursor's internal benchmark means you can lean on it heavily without burning through a usage cap.
• You are already in the Cursor ecosystem with existing .cursor/rules and team setup.

Pick Devin Desktop if:

• You want to manage multiple coding agents — local and cloud — from one Kanban-style view rather than one chat thread at a time.
• Your team already works in parallel, semi-autonomous workstreams where an agent can be handed a ticket and checked on later, which is what Spaces and cloud Devin are built for.
• You want early access to the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) ecosystem as it develops.

Pick neither if:

• You need a fully terminal-first, headless workflow — use Claude Code or aider instead.
• You cannot send code to third-party model providers for compliance reasons — look at a self-hosted setup with Continue.dev and a locally run model.

FAQ

Q: Is Windsurf still called Windsurf? A: No. Cognition rebranded Windsurf as Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026, integrating it with Devin, Cognition's autonomous coding agent. Existing users who restarted the editor after that date received Devin Desktop automatically, keeping their account, plan, and settings.

Q: What happened to Cascade, Windsurf's agent? A: Cascade was replaced by Devin Local, a new agent Cognition rewrote from scratch in Rust. Cognition reports Devin Local is roughly 30% more token-efficient than Cascade and, unlike Cascade, can spawn subagents to work on parts of a task in parallel.

Q: Did OpenAI end up buying Windsurf? A: No. OpenAI agreed to acquire Windsurf for approximately $3 billion in mid-2025, but the deal fell through over intellectual property and exclusivity concerns raised by Microsoft. Google DeepMind then acquihired Windsurf's CEO, co-founder, and a group of engineers along with a technology license, and Cognition separately acquired the remaining company, product, and brand.

Q: Is Devin Desktop cheaper than Cursor? A: Not anymore. Devin Desktop's Pro tier rose from $15 to $20 per month in a March 2026 pricing overhaul, matching Cursor Pro. Both companies' top individual tiers are also priced at $200 per month, so the price gap that historically favored Windsurf has closed.

Q: What is Cursor's Composer 2.5? A: Composer 2.5 is Cursor's third-generation in-house coding agent, launched May 18, 2026, built on Moonshot AI's open Kimi K2.5 checkpoint. It scores 79.8% on SWE-Bench Multilingual, close to Claude Opus 4.7's 80.5%, and Cursor reports it costs roughly $0.50 per task versus about $7 for Opus 4.7 on Cursor's internal benchmark.

Q: Which has the better autocomplete? A: Cursor's Tab has historically been considered the stronger predictive multi-line, multi-file autocomplete in the category. Devin Desktop's Supercomplete, inherited from Windsurf, remains competitive but Cognition's recent engineering focus has been on the agent layer (Devin Local, Agent Command Center) rather than autocomplete specifically.

Q: Can I use Claude in either editor? A: Yes. Both Cursor and Devin Desktop route to third-party frontier models including Claude Opus 4.7 and Claude Sonnet, alongside their own in-house agents (Composer 2.5 and Devin Local respectively), and let you switch models per request.

Q: Do both editors support MCP? A: Yes. Both Cursor and Devin Desktop support Model Context Protocol for connecting to external tools and data. Devin Desktop also supports the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), which lets ACP-compatible agents run inside any ACP-compatible editor.

Q: How big is Cursor's company now compared to when this comparison started? A: Anysphere, Cursor's parent company, went from a $9 billion valuation in mid-2025 to a $29.3 billion post-money valuation after a $2.3 billion Series D in November 2025, and reached a $60 billion valuation in April 2026 when SpaceX paid $10 billion for exclusive collaboration rights plus a buyout option. Revenue grew from roughly $100 million in annual recurring revenue in January 2025 to over $2 billion by February 2026.

Q: Should I migrate away from Devin Desktop if I only want a simple editor, not an agent-orchestration platform? A: If your workflow is a single developer reviewing one agent's diffs at a time, Cursor's interface is closer to that model than Devin Desktop's Kanban-based Agent Command Center, which is built around managing multiple concurrent agents. Neither editor is objectively wrong for solo work, but Devin Desktop's interface changes since June 2026 assume you will eventually use more than one agent at once.

The takeaway

"Windsurf vs Cursor" is no longer a comparison between two similar VS Code forks racing on price and autocomplete quality. Windsurf does not exist as a standalone product anymore — it was split apart in a 72-hour scramble across OpenAI, Google, and Cognition in July 2025, and resurfaced eleven months later as Devin Desktop, a genuinely different product built around orchestrating multiple AI agents rather than assisting one developer at a time. Cursor, over the same period, grew into a $60 billion company by doubling down on a single high-precision agent, Composer 2.5, that now rivals frontier models at a fraction of the cost. Both are strong tools. The right pick now depends less on price, which has converged, and more on whether you want an editor that assists you directly or a dashboard that supervises a small fleet of agents on your behalf.

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Read next:

• What Is Cursor? AI Code Editor Explained
• What Is Vibe Coding? AI-First Programming
• What Is Claude Code? Anthropic's AI Coding Tool
• What Is MCP? Model Context Protocol Explained