Side-by-side pricing, features and compliance for anything in the directory.
Side-by-side comparison of Cursor, Windsurf: pricing, capabilities, integrations and compliance — from verified HokAI records.
Anysphere
Pick it if: Full-stack engineers at startups who want to ship features without a QA bottleneck
Its edge: Background Cloud Agents running up to 10 parallel workers on Cursor's infrastructure, triggerable from Slack or mobile.
The catch: Context degradation on large codebases causes the AI to produce confident but incorrect multi-file edits, requiring careful human review that negates some of the speed benefit.
Cognition AI
Pick it if: Solo full-stack developers building SaaS MVPs who want agentic AI without a Cursor subscription
Its edge: Windsurf Tab autocomplete that never counts against usage quotas on any plan, making it the only AI IDE where the core autocomplete is genuinely unlimited regardless of tier.
The catch: Post-acquisition uncertainty (Cognition bought the business, Google hired key founders) creates real risk of product direction changes or deprecation that competitor Cursor does not face.
| Entry price | Free to start | Free to start |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | true | true |
| Paid tiers | Hobby — $0/mo; Pro — $20/mo; Pro+ — $60/mo | Free — $0/mo; Pro — $20/mo; Max — $200/mo |
| Hidden costs | Auto mode is unlimited on paid plans, but manually selecting frontier models draws down the monthly credit pool; heavy users can face overage charges not visible in the plan headline price; Invoice billing on the Teams plans requires an ann | 25 free prompt credits last 3 days for a typical developer, forcing an immediate Pro upgrade that doubles the expected monthly cost; Add-on credits cost $40 per 1,000 credits and are not clearly surfaced until a developer hits their monthly |
| Budget fit | mid | budget |
| Killer feature | Background Cloud Agents running up to 10 parallel workers on Cursor's infrastructure, triggerable from Slack or mobile. | Windsurf Tab autocomplete that never counts against usage quotas on any plan, making it the only AI IDE where the core autocomplete is genuinely unlimited regardless of tier. |
|---|---|---|
| Primary weakness | Context degradation on large codebases causes the AI to produce confident but incorrect multi-file edits, requiring careful human review that negates some of the speed benefit. | Post-acquisition uncertainty (Cognition bought the business, Google hired key founders) creates real risk of product direction changes or deprecation that competitor Cursor does not face. |
| Best for | Full-stack engineers at startups who want to ship features without a QA bottleneck; Engineering leads at mid-market companies replacing GitHub Copilot with a more agentic workflow | Solo full-stack developers building SaaS MVPs who want agentic AI without a Cursor subscription; Frontend engineers who want live preview and in-editor deployment as part of their iteration loop |
| Worst for | JetBrains users (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm) who are unwilling to switch IDEs; Healthcare software engineers who need HIPAA BAA coverage | Enterprise engineering leads who need stable vendor relationships and SLA guarantees, given recent acquisition turbulence; Developers working on monorepos larger than 500k lines where CPU spikes to 90% make the tool impractical |
| Minimum skill level | intermediate | basic |
| Defensibility | 9 Adoption across roughly two thirds of the Fortune 500, and revenue that passed $2B a year within three years (February 2026; about $4B by mid-2026), mean enterprise procurement, VS Code familiarity and an agent pipeline that improves the more code Cursor indexes. GitHub Copilot's distribution through Microsoft (90% of the Fortune 100) is the main competitive threat. | 6 Cascade's persistent Memories feature creates mild switching costs as it learns per-developer preferences, but the VS Code fork base means Cursor can replicate features quickly and the moat is eroding post-acquisition uncertainty. |
| Target audience | Software engineers at enterprises who need a full IDE with AI agents for complex multi-file refactors, Startup developers who want to ship features faster with autonomous Agent Mode, Teams already on VS Code looking for a zero-friction AI u | Solo developers who want unlimited Tab completion and inline edits at no cost, VS Code users who want an agent workspace without leaving their editor and extensions, Teams running several coding agents (Devin, Codex, Claude Agent) that want |
| HokAI rating | 4.4 Scored 2026-09-07 | 4 Scored 2026-09-29 |
| Key features | Agent Mode; Tab Completion; Cursor Automations (v3.8, June 2026) | Rebranded to Devin Desktop; Devin Local agent; Agent Command Center and Spaces |
|---|---|---|
| Capabilities | Function calling; Long context; Web browsing | Vision; Function calling; Code execution |
| Strengths | Cursor is one of the most widely adopted AI code editors among large enterprise engineering teams, including 20,000+ developers at Salesforce alone.; Tab completions respond faster than GitHub Copilot, and Agent Mode reduces boilerplate and | Unlimited Tab completion and inline edits on every plan, including Free, so a solo developer can use it without paying.; Keeps the VS Code extension ecosystem, so existing keybindings, LSPs and extensions carry over from Windsurf and VS Cod |
| Watch out for | Large codebases hit context limits, forcing the AI to choose what to include and sometimes choosing wrong, producing confident but incorrect edits.; As of August 2026, Anysphere was acquired by SpaceX and now operates inside the SpaceXAI di | Quotas are described only as light, increased and significantly higher, with no published credit counts, so monthly usage is hard to forecast.; Cognition may train on your data by default; paid plans can opt out, and on Teams only an admini |
| Underlying model | 5x Standard usage on Agent; separate pools for Cursor-native and third-party API models | -- |
| Context window | 200K | -- |
| MCP support | true | -- |
| Multimodal | text; code | -- |
Compare up to four at a time, or run Smart Match to get a ranked shortlist. Browse the full AI directory.