Head to head
Windsurf vs Cursor (2026): Cursor vs Windsurf Pricing, Quotas and Which Is Better
Two VS Code forks with an agent inside, now priced identically at every tier they share. Every figure read from Cognition's and Cursor's own documentation in August 2026.
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The short answer
Windsurf and Cursor now cost the same at every individual tier both of them sell, which makes most of the advice written about this pair out of date. Windsurf Pro rose from $15 to $20 in March 2026 and matched Cursor Pro exactly; both charge $200 for their power tier and $40 for a regular team seat. Two things still separate them. Cursor publishes what your subscription buys in dollars, $20 of included model usage on Pro, $70 on Pro Plus and $400 on Ultra, while Cognition publishes an unnumbered daily and weekly quota, so only one of these can be budgeted from its own documentation. And Devin Teams sells free flex seats where Cursor charges $40 for every user, so a team of ten with three regular coders pays $120 instead of $400. The catch is that flex seats do not include the editor. One more thing worth knowing before you compare: Windsurf was renamed Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026, and windsurf.com now redirects to devin.ai.
What happened to Windsurf?
Start here, because it changes how you read every other comparison of these two. Windsurf still exists and is still shipping, but it has been renamed. Cognition acquired it in July 2025 and, on June 2, 2026, folded it into the Devin brand as Devin Desktop. Most of what is currently written about "Windsurf vs Cursor" was written before that, and some of it prices a plan that no longer exists.
Windsurf is now called Devin Desktop
Cognition renamed it on June 2, 2026 and shipped the change as an ordinary over-the-air update. Its own FAQ puts it flatly: Devin Desktop is the new name for Windsurf, the same IDE, the same editor, the same features, unified under the Devin brand. If you were running Windsurf 2.0 you were already running what became Devin Desktop.
The domain now redirects, and you can check it yourself
windsurf.com returns a 308 to devin.ai/desktop, and windsurf.com/pricing returns a 308 to devin.ai/pricing. Going one step further back, codeium.com still 301s to windsurf.com. The whole lineage resolves in a single curl: Codeium became Windsurf, Windsurf became Devin Desktop.
Nothing was taken away and no price moved
The transition FAQ is explicit that plans, pricing and access all stay the same, including for legacy Windsurf Enterprise contracts, and that the editor, extensions, keybindings and workflows are all still there. There is no forced migration to ACU billing and no requirement to adopt Devin Cloud, which remains a separate product you buy separately.
Your Windsurf config still works, and so does your Cursor config
Devin Desktop still reads the legacy .windsurfrules file and .windsurf/rules/, with .devin/rules/ taking precedence for anything new. It also reads AGENTS.md. The part that matters if you are switching from Cursor: it can import .cursor/rules .mdc files into .devin/rules/, and the Devin CLI reads existing configuration from Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, VS Code and Zed.
Throughout this page we use "Windsurf" and "Devin Desktop" for the same product, because that is how people are still searching for it. We wrote up what Devin Desktop is and what changed in the rename separately if you want the detail.
What is the difference between Windsurf and Cursor?
Less than the marketing on either side implies. Both are forks of VS Code with an agent bolted into the sidebar, both pull extensions from Open VSX rather than the Microsoft marketplace, and both will happily run a long task while you watch. The differences that decide a purchase are about ownership and scope, how each vendor meters you, and what a team seat costs.
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| Windsurf / Devin Desktop | Cursor | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | An agentic IDE, now the desktop half of a wider Devin product line that also sells cloud agents, a CLI and an automated reviewer. The editor is one surface among several. | A code editor with an agent built into it, sold on its own. Cursor sells you the editor and nothing else. |
| Who owns it | Cognition, which signed the agreement to acquire Windsurf in July 2025 and folded it into the Devin brand in June 2026. | Anysphere, independent, still shipping under the Cursor name it launched with. |
| What it is based on | A VS Code fork, so extensions come from Open VSX rather than the Microsoft marketplace. | Also a VS Code fork, with the same Open VSX constraint. On this axis the two are the same product shape. |
| The agent inside it | Cascade, now joined by Devin Local, which Cognition describes as more efficient than Cascade, supporting subagents, and running the same harness as the Devin CLI. | Cursor Agent, plus Tab completion, which is the feature most Cursor subscribers say they are really paying for. |
| Which models you get | Cognition's own SWE models alongside Claude and GPT, with an Adaptive router that picks a model per task for you. | Cursor's own models (Composer 2.5, Grok 4.6 and 4.5) in one pool, plus third-party frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in a second, separately metered pool. |
| How usage is measured | A daily and weekly quota shared across Devin sessions, the CLI and Devin Desktop, then pay-as-you-go on-demand credits once you pass it. Credits as a primary unit were retired in March 2026. | A monthly dollar allowance of included third-party model usage, then on-demand billing in arrears at the same rates. |
| What the vendor publishes | The words "daily and weekly usage quota". No number. You cannot turn the documentation into a monthly forecast. | Exact dollars: $20 of included model usage on Pro, $70 on Pro Plus, $400 on Ultra. You can budget from this. |
| Free tier | Yes. A Free plan with limited usage, one member, and access to Devin Review and DeepWiki. | Yes. The Hobby plan gives a small monthly pool of agent requests and Tab completions, then pauses until the cycle resets. |
Windsurf vs Cursor pricing, tier by tier
The headline finding is how little separates them. Windsurf spent its first two years as the cheaper option and that stopped being true in March 2026, when Pro went from $15 to $20. Today the two ladders are identical everywhere except one rung in the middle and one seat type at the team level.
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| Tier | Windsurf / Devin | Cursor | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free plan, $0 | Hobby, $0 | Both limited, both enough to form an opinion, neither enough for daily professional work. |
| Entry paid | Pro, $20/mo | Pro, $20/mo | An exact match. Windsurf Pro was $15 until March 2026, so the old "Windsurf is the cheaper one" advice is simply out of date. |
| Middle | Nothing | Pro Plus, $60/mo | The one real gap in the individual ladder. Cursor sells a middle rung carrying $70 of included usage. Devin jumps straight from $20 to $200. |
| Power user | Max, $200/mo | Ultra, $200/mo | Another exact match on sticker price. Max removes the daily cap and raises the weekly quota; Ultra carries $400 of included model usage. |
| Team, per regular user | Full seat, $40/mo | Standard seat, $40/mo | Also an exact match. If every person on your team codes every day, these two cost you precisely the same. |
| Team, per occasional user | Flex seat, $0/mo | No such thing, $40/mo | This is the only row on the page where the two genuinely diverge at team scale, and it is worth real money. See the seat maths below. |
Read down the verdict column and the pattern is hard to miss: four exact matches, one missing middle rung, and one seat type that only one vendor sells. If you are choosing on sticker price alone, there is almost nothing here to choose between. Full tier detail for one side lives on our Cursor pricing breakdown, and the wider field is on AI coding tool pricing.
Windsurf vs Cursor for a team: the seat maths
This is the one place the two pricing models genuinely diverge, and it is worth real money in one specific shape of team. Cursor charges for every user: a Standard seat is $40 a month and there is no free tier of membership. Devin Teams splits members into full seats at $40 and flex seats at $0, with unlimited flex seats and an $80 monthly floor on the account.
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| Your team | Windsurf / Devin Teams | Cursor Teams | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 developers, all coding daily | 10 full seats, $400/mo | 10 Standard seats, $400/mo | No difference at all |
| 10 people, 3 code daily and 7 dip in occasionally | 3 full seats, 7 flex seats, $120/mo | 10 Standard seats, $400/mo | Devin saves $280/mo |
| 5 people, 1 codes daily and 4 dip in occasionally | 1 full seat plus $40 of credits to clear the $80 floor, $80/mo | 5 Standard seats, $200/mo | Devin saves $120/mo |
| 20 developers, all coding daily, some very heavy | 20 full seats, $800/mo, heavy users draw shared on-demand credits | 17 Standard plus 3 Premium at $120, $1,040/mo | Depends entirely on overage, not on sticker price |
The rule that falls out of this: these two cost exactly the same when everyone on your team codes every day, and Devin is cheaper only in proportion to how many of your people are occasional users. Before you bank the saving, check the caveat in the next section, because a free flex seat does not include the editor. Our cost per developer breakdown shows how to turn numbers like these into a budget line you can defend.
What actually decides your invoice
Sticker price is the least interesting part of this comparison, because the two are level on it. These five mechanics are where the real money and the real friction live, and most of them are documented somewhere other than the pricing page.
One of these two can be budgeted from published numbers, and it is not the one you would guess
Cursor tells you what your subscription buys in dollars: $20 of included third-party model usage on Pro, $70 on Pro Plus, $400 on Ultra. Divide by your model's API rate and you have a real forecast. Cognition publishes the phrase "a daily and weekly usage quota" and does not attach a number to it anywhere in the self-serve billing documentation. Neither approach is dishonest, but only one of them lets a finance team model next quarter before signing.
The $80 Teams floor is a real cost for small teams
Every Devin Teams account pays at least $80 a month regardless of headcount. Below two full seats the remainder is charged as prepaid on-demand credits the whole team can draw from, so a two-person shop with one heavy user pays $80 rather than $40. Cursor has no floor: two Standard seats cost $80 too, but one costs $40. For very small teams Cursor is the cheaper entry, and the flex-seat advantage only starts paying once you have several occasional users.
A flex seat is free, but it does not include the editor
This is the caveat that most of the saving depends on, and it is easy to miss. Devin flex seats draw entirely from the team's shared on-demand credit pool and explicitly do not include Devin Desktop access. So the free seat covers someone who occasionally uses the cloud agent, the CLI or Devin Review. Anyone who wants to open the IDE needs a full seat at $40, exactly like a Cursor seat. Model your team by who needs the editor, not by headcount.
Cursor charges a token surcharge that is only in the docs
On Teams and Enterprise plans Cursor applies a Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million tokens on top of the model's own API price for third-party model requests. First-party Cursor models and Auto Cost mode are exempt. It is in the pricing documentation, not on the pricing page. Per request it rounds to nothing. Across a team pointing agents at a large codebase all day it does not. There is also a 10% uplift on eligible models if you need regional data residency.
Quota resets and dollar allowances fail in different ways
Devin Pro carries both a daily and a weekly cap, which means a heavy Tuesday can stop you on Tuesday even though the week has room left. Max removes the daily cap and keeps the weekly one. Cursor has no daily gate at all: you spend the monthly allowance as fast as you like and then keep going into on-demand billing. If being interrupted mid-task is worse for you than an unexpected invoice, that difference matters more than the price.
Windsurf vs Cursor: which is better for your situation?
With the prices level, "which is better" comes down to what you need the tool to be. Here it is asked nine ways that do have answers.
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| If this is you | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You want autocomplete that finishes your line as you type | Cursor | Tab is the single most-cited reason people keep paying for Cursor. Devin Desktop has a Tab feature, but Cursor's is the more mature product and the one people switch editors for. |
| Most of your team only touches the tooling occasionally | Devin Desktop | Free flex seats have no Cursor equivalent. Just confirm your occasional users genuinely do not need the IDE, because flex seats do not include it. |
| Finance needs a defensible number before you sign | Cursor | Included usage is published in dollars per tier. Cognition publishes an unnumbered daily and weekly quota, so any Devin forecast is an estimate you built, not a figure you can cite. |
| You are a two or three person team | Cursor | The $80 Devin Teams floor applies whatever your headcount. One Cursor seat is $40 and one Devin Teams account is $80. |
| You want one vendor for the editor, a cloud agent, a CLI and code review | Devin Desktop | That consolidation is the entire point of the June 2026 rebrand. Cursor deliberately sells one thing. |
| Being blocked mid-task is worse than an unpredictable bill | Cursor | No daily gate. Devin Pro can stop you on a heavy Tuesday even with weekly quota remaining, though Max removes the daily cap. |
| You want the widest choice of frontier models in one place | Cursor | Two pools covering Cursor's own models plus OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Devin leans on Cognition's SWE models with an Adaptive router choosing for you. |
| You are switching and worried about losing your setup | Either, honestly | Devin Desktop imports .cursor/rules into .devin/rules/ and the CLI reads Cursor configuration directly. Migration in that direction is documented rather than improvised. |
| You mainly want work to arrive as a reviewable pull request | Neither, really | Both are editors you sit inside and steer. See the section below on what they leave to you. |
If you are weighing a wider field than this pair, our best AI for coding roundup covers the rest, and Cursor vs Claude Code, Cursor vs GitHub Copilot and Codex vs Cursor take the other pairs in this bracket. Google's entry is worth a look before you pay either of these, because Google Antigravity gives away on its free tier most of what both charge for. We put it head to head with the same rival on Antigravity vs Cursor.
What both of them leave to you
Windsurf and Cursor are both good, and they are both tools you sit inside. You open the editor, you describe something, you watch it work, you steer. Each can run a longer task in the background and each is honest that the meter keeps moving while it does. That is the shared constraint: the more work you hand over, the faster the quota or the allowance drains, and the harder next month's invoice is to predict. Neither vendor sells a plan whose cost does not move with how much you use it.
Agentcode is built for that gap rather than to replace either one. You describe a task, it plans, edits the files, runs your test suite, and opens a reviewable pull request on the GitHub or GitLab repository you already have. It never merges on its own. The bill is $29 a month, flat, with no included-usage allowance to run down and no daily quota to wait out, so neither table on this page has a row for us: there is nothing to meter.
Where they genuinely beat us: Cursor's Tab completion has no equivalent here and is worth the subscription on its own for a lot of people, Cursor reaches more model vendors than we do, and Devin Desktop's free flex seat is a better answer than ours for a team with a long tail of occasional users. If you want a frontier model at your fingertips while you type, buy one of them. If you want work arriving as reviewable pull requests on GitLab as well as GitHub, at a price you can forecast a year out, that is the case for us. Compare directly on Cursor alternatives.
Windsurf vs Cursor: your questions answered
Is Windsurf better than Cursor?
Neither is better outright, and in 2026 they cost the same at every individual tier that both offer. Cursor is stronger on Tab completion, model choice and budget transparency. Devin Desktop, which is what Windsurf is now called, is stronger if you want one vendor covering the editor, a cloud agent, a CLI and code review, or if much of your team only needs occasional access and can sit on free flex seats.
What happened to Windsurf?
Cognition acquired Windsurf in July 2025 and renamed it Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026. The product was not discontinued. Its own transition FAQ states the IDE, extensions, keybindings and workflows are unchanged and that plans, pricing and access all stay the same. windsurf.com now returns a 308 redirect to devin.ai/desktop.
Is Windsurf cheaper than Cursor?
Not any more at the individual level. Windsurf Pro was $15 a month until March 2026, when it moved to $20 and matched Cursor Pro exactly. Both charge $200 for their power-user tier and $40 for a regular team seat. The only place Devin is genuinely cheaper is a team with several occasional users, because its flex seats cost nothing and Cursor has no free seat.
How much does Windsurf cost per month?
As of August 2026 the Devin self-serve plans are Free at $0, Pro at $20 a month, Max at $200 a month, and Teams at a minimum of $80 a month. On Teams, a full seat is $40 a month and includes Devin Desktop access plus a Pro-equivalent quota, while flex seats are free and draw from the team's shared on-demand credit pool.
Does Windsurf still use credits?
Not as the primary unit. Cognition retired the credit-based model in March 2026 and replaced it with daily and weekly usage quotas shared across Devin sessions, the CLI and Devin Desktop. Credits still exist as pay-as-you-go on-demand top-ups once you exhaust your quota, and as the pool that free flex seats draw from on the Teams plan.
What is the difference between Windsurf and Cursor?
Both are VS Code forks with an agent inside, so the day-to-day feel is closer than most comparisons suggest. The real differences are ownership and scope, billing disclosure, and team seat structure. Cursor sells one editor and publishes included usage in dollars. Devin Desktop is one surface of a wider agent platform and publishes an unnumbered quota instead.
Can I switch from Cursor to Windsurf without losing my setup?
Largely yes, and it is documented rather than improvised. Devin Desktop can import .cursor/rules .mdc files into its own .devin/rules/ directory, it reads AGENTS.md, and the Devin CLI has a configuration import that reads settings from Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, VS Code and Zed. Extensions come from Open VSX in both editors, so that constraint does not change.
Which is better for a large codebase, Windsurf or Cursor?
Cursor has the stronger reputation here, mostly for codebase indexing and multi-file editing on large repositories. It is worth testing rather than taking on trust, because both vendors ship indexing and the honest answer depends on your repository. Run the same non-trivial refactor in both during the free tier before you commit a team to either.
Is there a free version of Windsurf or Cursor?
Both have one. Devin offers a Free plan with limited usage, a single member, and access to Devin Review and DeepWiki. Cursor offers the Hobby plan with a small monthly pool of agent requests and Tab completions. Each is enough to evaluate the editor properly and neither is enough for daily professional work, which is what the $20 tiers are for.
Last updated: August 2026
Still comparing?
Full pricing breakdowns for each tool: Cursor pricing, Devin pricing, Claude Code pricing, GitHub Copilot pricing and Kiro pricing.
Or read what Devin Desktop is, Codex vs Claude Code, how much Cursor costs per month, or step back to AI coding tool pricing across every tool and what an AI coding agent actually does.
A flat bill, on your repo
Connect a GitHub or GitLab repository you already have, describe a task, and read the pull request it opens. No included allowance to run down and no daily quota to watch.