Cursor vs Windsurf (Now Devin Desktop): Which AI Editor Should You Use?

First, get the names straight

A lot has changed for this pair over the past year, so the background comes first.

Windsurf began as an editor from Codeium and was acquired by Cognition, the company behind Devin, in 2025. In June 2026 Cognition renamed it Devin Desktop through a silent update that kept accounts, plans, extensions, and keybindings. What you download from the official site today is Devin Desktop; many people still call it Windsurf, and the JetBrains plugin still carries that name.

On the Cursor side, its parent company Anysphere was acquired by SpaceX in an all-stock deal in August 2026 and folded into its AI business. OpenAI then announced it would stop supplying models to Cursor. Cursor says OpenAI models account for about 5% of its user traffic, and Claude, Gemini, Grok, and its in-house Composer models remain available.

So this is no longer a contest between two near-identical editors. It is a choice between two different strategies.

Same foundation, different bets

The foundation is still the same: both are built on VS Code, extensions, keybindings, and config files are largely interchangeable, and switching in either direction gets you back to full productivity within a day. Migration cost should not drive your decision.

The difference is how each one thinks AI should be involved.

Cursor bets on completion plus its own models. Its best-known feature is still inline prediction — change one spot and it guesses the next few you'll edit, so you just press Tab. On the agent side it increasingly relies on its in-house Composer models, and tasks can move between the IDE, the command line, and cloud sessions.

Devin Desktop bets on being the shell that can hold every agent. Through the Agent Client Protocol (ACP, an open Apache 2.0 protocol) it treats third-party agents such as Codex, Claude Agent, and Gemini CLI as first-class citizens in the same window. Its own local agent is now Devin Local, and long tasks can be sent to Devin in the cloud. Cascade has been retired, so tutorials still describing Cascade's two modes are out of date.

Day-to-day feel: hundreds of times vs a handful

Completion happens hundreds of times a day. Even saving two seconds each time adds up; conversely, if completions keep guessing wrong and you keep pressing Esc, that frustration is multiplied hundreds of times too. Cursor has spent the longest polishing this, and it is the direct reason most developers pick it.

Agent tasks may happen only a few times a day, so per-task quality matters far more than latency. Devin Desktop's approach is not to bet that its own agent will always be best, but to let you swap agents in the same window and use whichever handles a given task better.

So the first filter is still: does your day involve more "I write the code, AI helps," or more "I describe what I want and wait for AI to deliver"? If it's the latter, ask one more question: are you already using more than one coding agent?

Context control: explicit attachment vs structured views

Cursor leans toward giving you control: you can explicitly attach specific files, folders, docs, and even web pages in the chat, at fine granularity. The upside is predictability — you know what it saw; the cost is a few extra seconds choosing. Large-repo indexing is the part it has refined longest.

Devin Desktop adds Codemaps and Spaces: the first visualizes repo structure, the second groups tasks and their context by project, which suits people pushing several lines of work at once. The larger and messier the codebase, the more explicit control is worth; when running tasks in parallel, grouped views save effort.

Cost structure: allowance rules matter more than the monthly fee

Both price as "subscription plus model allowance," so comparing headline monthly fees tells you little. What matters is how the allowance is consumed.

Cursor splits in-house and third-party models into separate pools; once a third-party allowance is used up, usage is billed at model rates, and you can set your own spending cap. Agent-heavy use with a preference for third-party frontier models burns through it quickly.

Devin Desktop gives unlimited Tab completion on every tier, counts its in-house SWE models per message and third-party models per actual token, and resets allowances daily and weekly, so you are less likely to run dry mid-month and stall for two weeks.

Both support bring-your-own-key, which matters especially for companies: you can route all calls through your own gateway and keep cost accounting and auditing in-house.

Supply-chain risk: this time it actually happened

Saying "watch service continuity" used to sound like boilerplate. This year it became real: both products changed owners, and Cursor lost a model supplier because its parent company changed hands.

For individuals, the practical advice is simple: don't hard-wire your workflow to a single model ID, and keep prompts and automation scripts model-agnostic. For team purchasing, put data-handling terms, notice obligations when model supply changes, and exit terms into the contract.

Our recommendation

Choose by how you work: if you mostly write code yourself and care about completion feel, choose Cursor; if you already switch between several coding agents and want one shell for them all, choose Devin Desktop.

If you can't decide, install both. They coexist without conflict, the same repo can be opened in either editor, and after two weeks with each, see which one you actually open more often — that tells you more than any review.

One last reminder: whichever you choose, don't skip code review. AI editors make writing code faster, but they don't make understanding code faster, and that gap eventually comes back as bugs. We've collected the checks in our AI-generated code review checklist, and for the trade-offs when agents go deeper, see Claude Code vs Cursor.