Windsurf vs Cursor

Short answer: you can't compare these two any more, because one of them stopped existing under that name on 2 June 2026. Cognition rebranded Windsurf to Devin Desktop, and retired Cascade — the agent that was the reason most people picked Windsurf — on 1 July 2026.

That's worth saying plainly, because nearly every comparison of these two on the web predates it and none of them have been updated. If you're evaluating "Windsurf" today you are evaluating a different product with a different name, owned by a company whose main business is a different thing entirely.

Written 2026-07-31 · Dates confirmed against Cognition's own announcements and contemporaneous reporting · If you find a comparison of these two without a 2026 date on it, it is describing a product that has since been renamed

What actually happened

The short version, in order:

When	What
July 2025	Google reverse-acquihired Windsurf's founding team, reportedly for $2.4B. The company kept existing without its founders.
14 July 2025	Cognition — the company behind Devin — acquired the product, IP and customers, days later.
2 June 2026	The product is rebranded Devin Desktop. "Windsurf" stops being a product name.
1 July 2026	Cascade is retired. Model routing moves to Devin's stack.

The acquisition price for the second step is reported inconsistently — figures from roughly $250M to $3B appear in different outlets — so we're not going to state one. What isn't in dispute is the sequence and the outcome.

Why this matters more than an ordinary rebrand: Cursor and Windsurf were close competitors partly because both were independent, editor-first companies whose whole business was the editor. One of them is now a desktop client inside a company whose flagship is an autonomous cloud agent. That changes what it is likely to become, not just what it is called.

What you're choosing between today

Restating the question honestly: it's Cursor vs Devin Desktop, and they're aimed at different work.

	Cursor	Devin Desktop (ex-Windsurf)
Company	Anysphere	Cognition
Shape	VS Code fork you work in	Desktop client onto Cognition's agent stack
The flagship product	This is it	Devin — the autonomous cloud agent
Pricing (Jul 2026)	Free · Pro $20 · Pro+ $60 · Ultra $200 · Teams $40/user	Tracks Devin's plans: Free · Pro $20 · Max $200 · Teams $80 + $40/seat
Models	Claude / GPT / Gemini, Cursor-routed	Cognition-routed blend incl. their own SWE-series models
Bring your own key	Chat only — Tab, Apply and the agent stay hosted	No confirmed BYOK

Cursor is the more conservative choice in the literal sense: it is still the thing it was, made by a company for whom it is the whole business, and your VS Code extensions and keybindings still work. Devin Desktop is interesting if you actually want Devin — an agent that goes away and does multi-hour work in a cloud VM — and want a local surface onto it.

If you liked Windsurf specifically because of Cascade's in-editor flow, that is the thing that's gone, and there's no version of this comparison where the answer is "stay."

Why it changes the answer

Three practical consequences.

Reviews are describing software you can't buy. Benchmarks, feature grids and "I used both for a month" posts from 2025 or early 2026 are about pre-acquisition Windsurf with Cascade. That isn't a small drift — the agent was replaced.

The roadmaps now point in different directions. Cognition's centre of gravity is autonomous cloud agents; the desktop client is a surface onto that. Anysphere's is the editor. Both are reasonable bets, but they're bets on different futures, and picking a tool is partly picking which one you think is right.

If you're deciding today, the real comparison set is bigger. Nobody searching this is committed to these two specifically — they're asking "which agentic editor." That set now includes Cursor against a terminal agent like Claude Code, which is a genuinely different shape and often the better question. Zed is worth a look if you want full bring-your-own-key on a free tier, which neither product on this page offers.

What else moved in 2026

Windsurf isn't the only one. If you're evaluating tools in this category right now, several things that appear in comparison articles have been retired or renamed this year:

Gemini CLI was retired on 2026-06-18, replaced by Antigravity CLI for individual users.
Roo Code was archived on 2026-05-15 at v3.54.0; the maintainers point users at Cline and Kilo Code.
Continue.dev is finished as a product — acquired by Cursor, final release 2026-06-19, cloud data deleted 2026-07-15.
AWS Q Developer is being sunset in favour of Kiro; new signups stopped 2026-05-15, IDE plugin support ends 2027-04-30.
GitHub Copilot moved to token-based AI Credits billing on 2026-06-01. Spending controls shipped with it, but only the user-level ones hard-stop — on organisation budgets, the setting that halts usage at the limit is off by default (details here).

The pattern is worth internalising if you're going to keep reading comparisons: this category consolidated hard in the first half of 2026, and the half-life of a review here is now measured in months. Check the date on anything you read, including this.

Where we fit, briefly

We build UFO, so weigh this accordingly — and we're not in this comparison. If you want an agentic editor, the two above are the ones to look at, and this page's only real advice is to look at them under the right names.

UFO is a different layer: a team chat where AI agents are members of channels alongside people, each running on a machine you've paired. It's the thing that starts mattering when there are several agents on several models and other people need to see what they did — not a replacement for the editor you write in.

The reason we track this landscape closely enough to notice a rebrand is that our users run these tools on the machines they pair with us.

Sources

Dates and events confirmed on 2026-07-31 against the acquiring company's announcements and contemporaneous reporting. Pricing is from vendor pages on the same date and changes frequently.

Not affiliated with Cognition or Anysphere. If something here is wrong or has gone stale, tell us and we'll fix it.