Comparison · under IB-CODE-2026.2
Cursor vs Windsurf
| Cursor | Windsurf | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Anysphere | Cognition (formerly Codeium) |
| Pricing | Pro $20/mo + token-based SDK usage | Free 25 credits/mo; Pro $15/mo (500 credits); Teams $30/user/mo |
| Default model | Composer 2 (proprietary) — switchable to Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Pro | SWE-1.5 (Cognition proprietary, trained with Devin's engineering stack); Claude/GPT switchable |
| CLI surface | ✓ | — |
| Eval status | queued | out of scope |
Comparison pending — neither side evaluated yet
Both Cursor and Windsurf are currently unevaluated under IB-CODE-2026.2. This page will update as evaluations land.
Want this comparison sooner? Vendors can commission an evaluation to bump their tool up the queue (with full editorial independence on the verdict). Readers can email hello@indiebench.dev to vote for which comparison ships next.
About each tool
Cursor
Cursor is the IDE-first agentic coding tool with $2B ARR by Feb 2026 (fastest B2B SaaS scaling on record). The Cursor SDK released April 29 2026 exposes the agent harness programmatically for the first time — codebase indexing, semantic search, subagent spawning, hooks, MCP. Evaluations under IB-COD…
Windsurf
Windsurf is the agentic IDE acquired by Cognition (the Devin team) in late 2025. The Cascade multi-step engine is genuinely strong — but it is IDE-only, with no standalone CLI or SDK as of May 2026. This puts Windsurf out of scope for IB-CODE-2026.2 (autonomous CLI/API evaluation). When the upcoming…