Windsurf IDE Review 2026: Cascade, Devin, and the New Pricing

Windsurf 2.0 shipped in April 2026 and changed what the product is. Cognition, the company behind Devin, put its autonomous coding agent right inside the editor. You plan a task locally with Cascade, click once, and it runs in a cloud VM while you carry on with something else. Nothing else works like that.

They also raised the price by 33%, dropped the credit system, and left a few rough edges that will annoy you every day.

Windsurf is an AI-first code editor, a fork of VS Code that used to be called Codeium. It is built around Cascade, an agent that watches what you do, and it is now connected to Cognition's Devin cloud agent and runs on their own SWE-1.6 model. Cognition bought Codeium in early 2026 and is backed at a $25B valuation (Bloomberg, April 2026), so the question of whether the company will survive is settled.

This review covers what daily use feels like: what works, what doesn't, and whether the Devin link is worth switching for.

Verified as of June 2026.

What is Windsurf, and how is it different?

Windsurf began as Codeium, an autocomplete plugin. In late 2024 the team rebuilt it as a full VS Code fork, designed around working with AI instead of bolting AI on. Your keybindings, themes and extensions carry over, so switching takes about five minutes.

The difference from Cursor or Copilot isn't one feature. It's the design. Windsurf was built for agentic work: the AI runs commands, edits several files and tests its own output, instead of just suggesting text. Version 2.0 went further and connected that local agent to a cloud one.

What did 2.0 add?

Three things, all on April 15, 2026.

Devin cloud agents are the big one. They are why Windsurf now has a different pitch from Cursor, not just a cheaper one. You scope the work locally with Cascade and hand it off with a click. Devin starts a full cloud VM with a browser, a desktop and a terminal, and does the work on its own. The results come back into your editor. You can run several Devin sessions while you keep coding.

Agent Command Center is a Kanban board of every active agent session. It sounds like a nice extra, and mostly it is, until you have three or four Devin sessions going and can't remember which one is doing what.

Spaces bundle the context for one task: agent sessions, PRs and files. When you switch between two features, you don't rebuild the context each time. Think of workspaces, but for conversations.

What is it like to use Cascade?

Cascade has a chat mode for questions and planning, and a code mode for editing files. What sets it apart is flow awareness. It keeps track of your edits, your terminal commands and your clipboard.

In practice, you stop explaining things. Open a file, run a failing test, type "fix this", and it already knows which file you are in, what the error said and what you changed five minutes ago.

Memories last between sessions, so Cascade remembers your project habits, API patterns and preferences. Close it on Friday, open it on Monday, and it still knows your testing style. They do go stale after a big refactor. When the advice starts to sound out of date, clear them in Settings > Memories.

Turbo Mode lets Cascade run terminal commands without asking each time. That is either freeing or scary, depending on how much risk you like. In 2.0, it can also hand a task to Devin by itself when the job is too big to run locally. It passes the whole conversation over, so Devin doesn't start cold.

What does a real task look like?

Here is a real workflow from last week. I had a Django app that needed a new API endpoint: model, serializer, view, URL and tests. It is the kind of task that touches six files.

I opened the project and typed: "Add a REST endpoint for user preferences — model with theme and notification fields, full CRUD, token auth, include tests." Cascade already knew my project from Memories: that I use DRF, how my serializers look, and how I write tests.

It made the model, wrote the migration, built the serializer and viewset, wired up the URL and wrote five tests. From prompt to working code took about 90 seconds. I read the diff, renamed one field and ran the tests. Four passed. The fifth needed a fixture fix, which Cascade handled in a follow-up.

What impressed me most was asking it to "add rate limiting like the other endpoints." Because it had been watching, it found my existing throttle classes, matched the pattern and applied it without me pointing at anything.

What didn't impress me: later I tried to split a 400-line view file into modules. Around message 25, Cascade started losing track of what it had already moved. I dropped the chat and started a fresh one, letting Memories carry the big picture. It isn't fatal, but you learn to keep sessions short.

The Devin handoff is best for work you would otherwise put off. "Write integration tests for all 12 endpoints" took about 8 minutes and came back needing only light cleanup.

Which models does it use?

SWE-1.6 arrived on April 7, 2026. It scores more than 10% better than 1.5 on SWE-Bench Pro, overthinks less, and uses parallel tools better. At 950 tok/s it is roughly 13x faster than Claude Sonnet 4.5, and you notice the gap straight away when it edits several files at once.

The habit that saves money: use SWE-1.6 for routine work, since it costs zero quota. Spend your real allocation on Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5 or Gemini 3 Flash when the problem needs proper reasoning.

A few other things are worth knowing:

• Tab to Jump predicts where you will edit next and offers to take you there. It is more useful than it sounds once you stop fighting it.
• Arena Mode runs two models on the same prompt side by side. Only Windsurf has it, and it is the fastest way to find out which model suits your codebase.
• Agent Skills live in .windsurf/skills/ as reusable bundles of conventions. They are part of the wider Claude Skills standard.
• MCP support covers 21+ tool connections for databases, APIs and other services.

How much does it cost?

In March 2026, credits were replaced by usage quotas that refresh daily and weekly. You can no longer save up credits before a big sprint. That is a downgrade if you work in bursts and an improvement if you don't.

Students get 50% or more off Pro. The jump from $15 to $20 annoyed many users, and the Trustpilot reviews show it. Still, a quota is arguably fairer than credits that expired unused.

Windsurf and Cursor now cost exactly the same. The 25% discount Windsurf had in early 2026 is gone, so the choice comes down to features. Copilot stays cheapest if you don't need agents.

How does it compare with Cursor and Copilot?

Take Windsurf if you want a cloud agent in your editor, memory across days, or SWE-1.6 at zero quota. Devin is the real difference. Planning locally and running in the cloud isn't something you can put together from the alternatives.

Take Cursor if you want up to eight agents working in parallel while you watch, or if you value the bigger community and extension ecosystem. Running things in parallel is its strongest card on big multi-file jobs.

Take Copilot if you live in GitHub, if $10 a month really matters, or if all you want is fast autocomplete. That is where Copilot still wins, and it isn't close.

More scenarios are in AI Coding Agents Compared.

What will annoy you?

CPU use is heavy. Expect 70-90% on codebases over about 50K lines, because the indexing is hungry. Put node_modules, build output and data folders in .windsurfignore. Do it on day one, not after the fans start screaming.

Autocomplete trails Copilot by roughly 100-200ms. Community polls put Windsurf's suggestions at about 55-60% useful, against 70-75% for Copilot. If inline completion is what you need most, this is the wrong tool. Windsurf's strength is the agent, not the suggestions.

Long chats get worse after about 30 messages. Cascade starts re-reading files it already changed and forgetting rules from the start of the chat. Keep each session to one task and let Memories carry the rest.

Big files slow it down past roughly 300-500 lines. Cascade wants well-split code. That is a fair thing to want, and a little irritating to hear from your editor.

There is no partial undo. If it goes wrong on step four of six, you can't keep the first three. A correction usually restarts the whole task, so commit small and often.

What if something goes wrong?

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Windsurf worth it in 2026?

For most developers, yes. Windsurf 2.0 put Devin cloud agents inside the editor, and no other editor does that. SWE-1.6 is fast (950 tok/s) and costs no quota. At $20/mo Pro it costs the same as Cursor but adds Devin and persistent Memories. The rough edges are heavy CPU use on large projects and autocomplete that trails Copilot.

What changed in Windsurf 2.0?

It shipped on April 15, 2026 with three things: Agent Command Center (a Kanban view of all your agent sessions), Devin cloud agents (plan locally with Cascade, run in a cloud VM), and Spaces (context bundles for multi-agent work).

Windsurf vs Cursor: which is better in 2026?

They cost the same now ($20/mo Pro). Windsurf has Devin cloud agents, persistent Memories and SWE-1.6 at zero quota. Cursor has up to 8 parallel agents and a bigger community. Pick Windsurf for Devin and Cursor for parallel agents.

Did Windsurf raise its price?

Yes. In March 2026 Pro went from $15 to $20/mo and Teams from $30 to $40 per user per month. Credits were replaced by daily and weekly usage quotas, and a new Max tier arrived at $200/mo.

Is Windsurf free?

Yes. The free tier has a basic usage quota that refreshes daily and weekly, SWE-1.6 at 200 tok/s (no quota cost), Tab completions and Previews. Pro is $20/mo for a bigger quota and all models.

So, should you switch?

Switch if the Devin handoff solves a problem you really have: long, boring, well-defined work you keep putting off. That is a smaller group than the marketing suggests, but for those people nothing else comes close.

Stay where you are if autocomplete quality matters most, or if you want several agents working in parallel where you can see them, instead of one working out of sight.

The free tier is good enough to test with, because SWE-1.6 at 200 tok/s costs no quota. So the honest advice is to spend an afternoon with it instead of trusting anyone's review, including this one. Try Arena Mode on your own code while you are there. The free SWE model beats the expensive ones more often than you would expect.

It pairs well with a terminal agent: Windsurf for daily editor work, and Claude Code for multi-repo refactoring from the shell.

Working out your whole AI coding stack? The AI-Assisted Engineering Playbook covers prompt patterns, tool choice and workflow strategy across all of these.