Windsurf

Windsurf — Agentic IDE built around Cascade, now owned by Cognition after a turbulent 2025. Windsurf is an agentic IDE whose Cascade flow keeps the agent aware of what you are doing in the editor rather than only what you typed in a prompt. After an aborted OpenAI acquisition, a Google licensing deal and the acquisition of the remainder by Cognition in mid-2025, it now sits alongside Devin under one owner. It ships in-house models and prices in credits, which makes real monthly cost hard to forecast. Built by Cognition. Founded 2021. Licensed Proprietary.

We track it in 1 comparison — Coding agents — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 16 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it wins.

• Token markup — Yes, which only 3 of 16 tools here manage.
• Repo indexing — embeddings index, 3rd of 16.

Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.

Where it gives ground.

• Headless / CI — No. Claude Code records Yes.
• Pricing model — opaque credits, 14th of 16. opencode records BYOK tokens only.
• Local models — No. Codex CLI records Yes.
• Licence — proprietary, 10th of 15. Codex CLI records Apache-2.0.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 21 of 26 tracked fields carry a value for Windsurf, and 4 of those cite a document you can open. Last verified 2026-01-15. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is Aider. Windsurf is ahead on MCP (Yes against No) and Token markup (Yes against No). Aider takes Headless / CI (Yes against No) and Licence (Apache-2.0 against proprietary). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Windsurf alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Company

Cognition

Founded

2021

Licence

Proprietary

Fields we track

21 of 26

Last verified

2026-01-15

Cascade's editor awareness is genuinely good and the retrieval engine is mature, but the 2025 ownership churn — an aborted OpenAI deal, a Google licensing carve-out, then acquisition by Cognition — is a real continuity risk. Credit pricing makes monthly cost hard to forecast.

Headless / CI

○No15th of 16

Inferred

Pricing model

opaque credits14th of 16

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-01-15source

Token markup

●Yes1st of 16

Inferred

Local models

○No11th of 16

Inferred

Entry price

$15 /seat/mo12th of 16

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-01-15source

Model breadth

multi-vendor8th of 16

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

Repo indexing

embeddings index3rd of 16

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

MCP

●Yes1st of 15

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

Windsurf is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• Developers who want the agent tracking what they are editing, not just what they typed.
• Teams already invested in Codeium's retrieval and enterprise deployment.
• Token markup is your binding constraint. Windsurf records Yes, which only 3 of the 16 tools in the Coding agents roster do.
• Repo indexing is your binding constraint. Windsurf records embeddings index, 3rd of 16 in the Coding agents roster. We define that field as how much structure the harness has about your code before the first token: nothing, live search, a parsed symbol map, a persistent vector index, or an index read alongside live search.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• Headless / CI. Windsurf records No on the Coding agents table. Claude Code records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Pricing model. Windsurf records opaque credits, 14th of 16 in the Coding agents roster. opencode records BYOK tokens only on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Local models. Windsurf records No on the Coding agents table. Codex CLI records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Licence. Windsurf records proprietary, 10th of 15 in the Coding agents roster. Codex CLI records Apache-2.0 on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 5 of the 26 fields we track for Windsurf are still blank: Subagents, Hooks, GitHub stars, Terminal-Bench and Bench model. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.