The battle for the best AI coding tool may be getting old, but it’s far from losing its spark. While GitHub Copilot, the long-standing champion, has reigned supreme for years, Cursor arrived to challenge its dominance. Following several ups and downs and a slew of coding tools entering the fray, Windsurf seems to have taken the top spot again, and for all the good reasons.
Developers are transitioning from Anysphere’s Cursor to Codeium’s Windsurf faster than ever as developers discover that the platform is not only very similar to Cursor but also faster and more accurate.
“Everyone is talking about Cursor, but if I were an investor, I’d prefer Windsurf. Their engineering capabilities, especially in product design, far surpass those of Cursor,” Steve Yeow, co-founder of OriginX AI, said on X. According to him, with every new release, Windsurf just keeps getting better.
In November, Codeium, one of the biggest rivals to Cursor and GitHub Copilot, launched Windsurf, claiming to be the first agentic IDE for coding. Windsurf’s performance, particularly its Cascade Base model, was a significant factor influencing the switch.
This model, powered by Meta Llama 3.1 70B, offers unlimited prompts and performs comparably to premium models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet or Cursor’s Composer. “Cascade is much better than Composer, in my honest opinion: no unwanted switch between chat and composer; it’s just one cascade in Windsurf,” a developer said.
Moreover, Windsurf now offers models like DeepSeek, Anthropic’s Claude, and even OpenAI’s o3-Mini.
Why is the Shift Happening Now?
Rick Lamers, an AI researcher and engineer at Groq, said he waited too long to test out Windsurf and has now realised that it is “much more agentic than Cursor”. This sentiment is echoed in community discussions, where users highlight Windsurf’s superior context handling, especially when editing multiple files.
Windsurf seems more reliable for editing multiple files and knows the context better. Kevin Hou, head of product engineering at Windsurf, hinted at the upcoming release of its AI code editor. This release will better handle shorter contexts, an area where Cursor currently excels.
“After three months of using Cursor, I switched to Windsurf and found it more cost-effective with its unlimited Cascade base model performing very close to Claude 3.5 Sonnet,” a developer said.
Pricing plays a pivotal role in tool selection. Windsurf charges $15 per month for its services, providing 500 premium model prompts and unlimited access to the Cascade base model. In contrast, Cursor’s basic plan is priced at $20 per month, offering 500 fast premium requests and unlimited slow requests.
Dharmesh Shah, CTO at HubSpot, recently shared his experience on LinkedIn while helping his 14-year-old son choose a coding tool for an AI-based web application.
“I personally use Cursor for my development, but [I’m] not sure if it’s the best choice for a ‘generate an entire app’ use case. I’ve heard good things about Bolt and Windsurf,” he said, adding that he is also a fan of Replit.
Cursor is Also Getting Better
Reacting to Shah’s comment, Jonathan Tushman, CPO and CTO at Hi Marley, said, “Right now, it’s a toss-up between Cursor and Windsurf. But for beginners, Windsurf has the advantage. They’ve just released a major upgrade that includes web search, which is a big deal.”
In practical applications, especially with large codebases and complex projects, reliability and accuracy are paramount. Some developers have observed that while Cursor delivers high-quality responses, it occasionally produces hallucinations or nonsensical outputs.
Windsurf, on the other hand, has been praised for its consistent performance in understanding and editing multiple files, which is crucial for large-scale projects. “Cursor is genuinely performant. Its speed and the quality of its responses are satisfying. That said, even with well-crafted prompts, it sometimes hallucinates and generates nonsense.”
All things considered, both the tools are more similar than they are different.
Both Cursor and Windsurf are built upon the open-source VSCodium, allowing users to integrate existing extensions, themes, and keybindings. This compatibility ensures that developers can maintain their preferred workflows without disruption.
Despite this, developers do not always stick to one coding tool. They bounce between Cursor, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, Aider, Pearl, Void, Melty, Zed, Cline, and a hundred others on a monthly basis. The truth is, none of them have reached perfection.
