The question I get asked most in 2026 is not "should I use an AI IDE?" but "which one?" And in almost every case, the answer comes down to two products: Cursor and Windsurf.

Both are VS Code forks. Both ship agentic coding assistants that can plan, edit, and run terminal commands across your entire codebase. Both support the same frontier models - Claude Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex, Gemini 3.1 Pro. On paper, they look nearly identical. In practice, they solve different problems for different kinds of developers, and the gap between them is narrower than most comparison articles want to admit.

I have been running both editors as my daily drivers for the past several months, alternating weekly. Here is what actually matters when choosing between them.

Quick Comparison

Feature	Cursor	Windsurf
Developer	Anysphere	Cognition (acquired from Codeium)
Base	VS Code fork	VS Code fork
Pro Price	$20/month	$15/month
Teams Price	$40/user/month	$30/user/month
Proprietary Model	Composer 1.5 (MoE, thinking)	SWE-1.5 (frontier agentic, 950 tok/s)
Agent Feature	Agent Mode + Subagents	Cascade + Multiple Cascades
Tab Completion	Supermaven-powered	Supercomplete (SWE-1-mini)
Cloud Agents	Yes (Background Agents)	No (local only)
Plugin System	Marketplace (Feb 2026)	MCP + Workflows
Unique Feature	Mission Control, Visual Editor	Arena Mode, Codemaps
Max Context	1M tokens (MAX mode)	1M tokens (Claude 1M variants)
LogRocket Ranking	#3 (Feb 2026)	#1 (Feb 2026)
Enterprise Certs	SOC 2 Type II	SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, ITAR

Cursor: Deep Dive

Cursor is built by Anysphere, a company that raised $2.3 billion in its Series D round in November 2025, reaching a $29.3 billion valuation. They crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue the same month. Over a million developers use it daily, and more than half of the Fortune 500 have adopted it. By any financial metric, Cursor is the dominant AI IDE.

The technical foundation reflects that investment. Cursor's Agent Mode is the default interaction model - you describe a task, and the agent explores your codebase, reads documentation, edits files across multiple modules, and runs terminal commands. With the v2.4 release in January 2026, Cursor introduced Subagents: independent agents that handle discrete parts of a parent task in parallel, each with their own model selection and tool access. In my testing, a file conversion task that took 17 minutes with a serial agent completed in 9 minutes with parallel subagents - a genuine productivity gain, not a marketing number.

Cursor also ships its own proprietary model, Composer 1.5, a mixture-of-experts architecture trained with reinforcement learning. It is a thinking model that generates reasoning tokens and can self-summarize when context runs out during long tasks. Anysphere classifies it in the "Fast Frontier" tier alongside Haiku 4.5 and Gemini Flash 2.5 - not as accurate as Sonnet 4.5 or GPT-5, but 4x faster than similarly intelligent models. For quick iterations and simple tasks, it is genuinely useful.

The February 2026 v2.5 release added a Plugin Marketplace with launch partners including Figma, Linear, Stripe, and AWS. Combined with Background Agents that run on Cursor's servers without a laptop connection (accessible via Slack, Linear, or GitHub), Cursor is pushing hard on the "AI that works while you sleep" narrative. For a deeper look at Cursor's standalone capabilities, see our full Cursor IDE review.

Windsurf: Deep Dive

Windsurf's story is more turbulent. Originally built by Codeium, it went through a wild ownership saga in mid-2025: OpenAI announced a $3 billion acquisition in May, the deal collapsed in July when Microsoft blocked it, Google's DeepMind poached CEO Varun Mohan and key R&D staff the same weekend, and Cognition (makers of the Devin autonomous agent) acquired the remaining assets - IP, product, brand, and $82 million in ARR - days later. Three weeks after that, Cognition laid off 30 Windsurf employees.

Despite the corporate chaos, the product has not only survived but improved. Windsurf's Cascade agent tracks everything: edits, terminal output, clipboard, conversation history, and prior actions. It builds a persistent context model of your workflow that gets better the longer you use it in a session. Where Cursor's agent is powerful but stateless between tasks, Cascade's Memories feature retains context across sessions - a meaningful advantage for developers working on the same codebase over weeks.

The standout technical achievement is SWE-1.5, Windsurf's proprietary frontier coding model served via a Cerebras partnership at up to 950 tokens per second. That is 6x faster than Haiku 4.5 and 13x faster than Sonnet 4.5. Tasks that take 20+ seconds on other models complete in under 5 seconds. SWE-1.5 costs zero credits on the free and paid plans, which means Windsurf users get a genuinely capable coding model at no marginal cost.

Windsurf's most innovative recent feature is Arena Mode (launched January 30, 2026): blind side-by-side model comparisons within the IDE. You send a prompt, two agents (with hidden model identities) work on it in parallel, and you vote on which response is better. It feeds into personal and global leaderboards. No competitor offers anything like this, and it is genuinely useful for discovering which models work best for your specific codebase.

Benchmark Comparison

Direct IDE-to-IDE benchmarks are sparse because both tools support the same underlying models. The differentiation is in their proprietary models and agent orchestration. Here is what we can compare:

Metric	Cursor	Windsurf
SWE-Bench Pro (IDE agent)	58%	Not published (SWE-1.5 claims "near-SOTA")
Proprietary Model Speed	Composer 1.5: 4x faster than similar tier	SWE-1.5: 950 tok/s (13x faster than Sonnet 4.5)
Multi-file Edit Latency	~1.2 seconds	Not published
Tab Suggestion Latency	p99 of 45ms	Not published
Parallel Agents	Up to 8 subagents	Multiple Cascades (limit not published)
Fast Context Retrieval	Codebase indexing with Merkle trees	SWE-grep-mini: 2,800+ tok/s, 8 parallel calls
LogRocket AI Dev Tool Ranking (Feb 2026)	#3	#1

The LogRocket rankings (which evaluate 50+ features across performance, usability, value, and deployment) placed Windsurf at #1 and Cursor at #3 in February 2026, with Google's Antigravity (still in free preview) at #2. For context on how the underlying models stack up, check our coding benchmarks leaderboard which tracks SWE-Bench, Terminal-Bench, and LiveCodeBench scores across all major LLMs.

Both tools support the same frontier models. Claude Opus 4.6 scores 80.8% on SWE-Bench Verified; GPT-5.2 hits 69%; Gemini 3 Flash reaches 78%. See our Claude Opus 4.6 model page for the full spec breakdown. The model you select matters more than the IDE wrapping it - but the agent orchestration, context management, and proprietary models create meaningful differences in how effectively those models get applied to your code.

Pricing Analysis

This is where the comparison gets interesting. Both use credit-based systems, but the economics differ significantly.

Plan	Cursor	Windsurf
Free	Limited credits, 2-week Pro trial	25 credits/month, all premium models
Pro	$20/month ($20 in API credits)	$15/month (500 credits/month)
Pro+/Ultra	$60/month ($70 credits) / $200/month ($400 credits)	N/A (buy add-on credits at $10/250)
Teams	$40/user/month	$30/user/month (+$10 for SSO)
Enterprise	Custom	Custom (1,000 credits/user/month)

Cursor's $20/month gets you roughly 225 Claude Sonnet requests or 500 GPT-5 requests. Heavy users regularly exceed this, and the pricing controversy from June 2025 (when Cursor switched from request caps to credits) still echoes in developer forums. CEO Michael Truell publicly apologized for the rollout, but the fundamental issue remains: it is hard to predict your monthly bill.

Windsurf's $15/month gets you 500 credits, but credit costs vary wildly by model: Claude Sonnet 4.5 costs 2 credits, Claude Opus 4.6 costs 6, and SWE-1.5 costs zero. A developer who leans on SWE-1.5 for routine tasks and saves Opus for complex problems can stretch 500 credits much further than Cursor's equivalent budget. Add-on credits ($10 for 250) also roll over indefinitely, which Cursor's do not.

For teams, the gap is even wider: Windsurf Teams at $30/user/month is 25% cheaper than Cursor Teams at $40/user/month. If you are evaluating these tools for a 50-person engineering org, that is $6,000/month in savings - a number that matters. For more options on free and budget-friendly setups, see our free AI coding setup guide.

Cursor: Strengths

Background Agents that run on Cursor's servers without a laptop connection, accessible from Slack, Linear, and GitHub
Subagents with parallel execution and custom model selection per subtask
Plugin Marketplace with first-party integrations from Figma, AWS, Stripe, Linear
Composer 1.5 proprietary thinking model for fast, accurate iterations
Mission Control grid view for managing multiple agent workflows simultaneously
Visual Editor for drag-and-drop UI changes that map to React/CSS edits
Massive ecosystem: 1M+ daily users, 50%+ Fortune 500 adoption, SOC 2 Type II
Best-in-class codebase indexing with Merkle tree-based change detection

Cursor: Weaknesses

$20/month Pro is 33% more expensive than Windsurf's $15/month for comparable features
Credit anxiety is real - developers report hitting limits "multiple times a day" on the Pro plan
No blind model comparison feature equivalent to Windsurf's Arena Mode
Privacy Mode is OFF by default, meaning code data may be used for training unless you opt out
Extension ecosystem uses standard VS Code marketplace, but some Cursor-specific features break with certain extensions

Windsurf: Strengths

SWE-1.5 at zero credits - a frontier-capable coding model that does not eat into your monthly budget
$15/month Pro is the most competitive price point for a premium AI IDE
Arena Mode for blind model comparisons is genuinely novel and practically useful
Memories provide persistent cross-session context that Cursor lacks
Fast Context with SWE-grep-mini at 2,800+ tokens/second for rapid codebase retrieval
Codemaps: AI-annotated visual maps of codebases for navigation
Enterprise security certifications (SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, ITAR) exceed Cursor's SOC 2 only
Add-on credits roll over indefinitely

Windsurf: Weaknesses

Corporate instability: three ownership changes in two months (OpenAI, Google, Cognition), layoffs, key leadership departures
Reliability complaints: users report accept-changes malfunctions, unintended code deletions, and infinite error-fix loops
No cloud/background agents - everything runs locally, no "fire and forget" async workflows
No plugin marketplace - relies on MCP integrations and workflows instead of a curated ecosystem
Smaller user base and community compared to Cursor's million-plus daily users
One experienced developer reported Windsurf was "a net drag on productivity" for a Python 2-to-3 migration, with 50% of suggestions incorrect

Verdict

There is no clean winner here, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something.

Choose Cursor if you need background agents that run without your laptop, you work in a large enterprise that values ecosystem maturity and Fortune 500 validation, or you want the Plugin Marketplace integrations with tools like Figma and Stripe. Cursor's subagent architecture is also the best option for parallelizing complex, multi-step coding tasks. If your team already uses it and the $20/month is not a concern, there is no compelling reason to switch.

Choose Windsurf if you are cost-sensitive ($15/month with zero-credit SWE-1.5 is hard to beat), you want Arena Mode for empirical model selection, or you need enterprise security certifications beyond SOC 2. Windsurf's Memories and persistent session context also make it the better choice for long-running projects where you are in the same codebase for weeks. For teams, the $10/user/month savings over Cursor adds up fast.

Choose either if your primary concern is access to frontier models. Both support Claude Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex, and Gemini 3.1 Pro. Both are VS Code forks with familiar keybindings and extension support. Both have capable agentic assistants that can plan, edit, and execute across your codebase. The underlying model you select will have more impact on output quality than the IDE wrapping it.

One thing worth noting: the most productive developers I talk to in 2026 are not locked into a single tool. They use Cursor's background agents for async refactoring, Windsurf's Arena Mode for model evaluation, and Claude Code from the terminal for surgical, single-file changes. The "which IDE" question may be less important than "which combination." For a broader view of the AI coding tool landscape, see our best AI coding assistants roundup.

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