First-party only — a session id and where you arrived from, so we can tell which pages are worth writing more of. No advertising, no third-party trackers, nothing that follows you off this site.
Both are on this list because they are genuinely good at something. The question is which something you need. Below is the factual comparison, then the honest answer about who each one is for.
Reviewed July 25, 2026 · pricing changes often, check the vendor
| Cursor | Windsurf | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Anysphere | Windsurf |
| Where it runs | Editor | Editor |
| Models | Multiple providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and others, selectable | Multiple providers plus in-house models |
| Pricing | Free tier · Pro $20/mo · higher tiers for heavy use | Free tier · paid individual and team plans |
| Open source | No | No |
| Best for | Developers who want AI woven into the editing loop itself rather than sitting in a separate window. | Teams that want an agentic editor and need a self-hosting story. |
The inline prediction is the strongest reason to use it — it is a different experience from chat
Model choice per task rather than being locked to one vendor
Rules files keep project conventions in front of the model without re-pasting
You are adopting an editor, not adding a feature to the one you have
Usage accounting across tiers and models is genuinely confusing
Agent mode over large refactors still needs close supervision
Cascade holds task state well across many steps
Self-hosted deployment is available, which matters for regulated codebases
Editor experience is coherent rather than bolted on
Another editor to adopt
Credit-based pricing makes cost hard to predict
Smaller ecosystem than VS Code or Cursor
Pick Cursor if developers who want AI woven into the editing loop itself rather than sitting in a separate window.
Pick Windsurf if teams that want an agentic editor and need a self-hosting story.
And a thing worth saying plainly: the gap between these two is smaller than the gap between a repo that tells an agent what it is and one that does not. If you are choosing between them to fix inconsistent output, the tool is probably not the variable. The free Foundations track covers the part that is.