Cursor vs Windsurf - which is the BEST AI Code Editor?

About a week ago, I started using a new AI code editor called Windsurf. Up to this point, I had been using Cursor for about eight or nine months, so I am very comfortable and familiar with it. However, this new editor has some really cool features that I wanted to check out. I aimed to compare the two editors and highlight some of the differences between them, as well as provide recommendations on when to use one over the other. In planning this video, I realized that I needed a better way to evaluate various AI code editors, so I came up with the Volo Score, which is a set of evaluation criteria for AI coding tools. If you want to learn more about how that score actually works, check out this related video about the Volo Score.

But now, let's go ahead and dive into the 10 evaluation criteria and see how Cursor compares to Windsurf. Keep in mind that both of these tools are forks of VS Code, which means they're running locally on your computer, and they expect you to have some basic understanding of what it takes to edit code, run code locally, and things of that nature. Additionally, this also means that they will share many similarities in terms of how they handle extensions, settings, and the types of integrations they support, among other aspects. That being said, there are some key differences.

So, let's look into those. Starting off with the intelligence category, we will first examine context awareness. How well do these tools understand your intent, which files they need to modify, and what sort of changes they need to make? I filmed this video, I'm editing it, and guess what happens?

Cursor has released a significant new version that introduces a variety of agentic capabilities. This just goes to show how rapidly things evolve in the AI coding space. I decided to keep this video as is, comparing version 42 of Cursor to Windsurf, and I will spend some time working with version 43 to provide an updated review. Therefore, this review does not include the new agentic capabilities that Cursor added in version 43. With Cursor, you can tag specific files to give it the context it needs to modify the relevant code. You can also make requests that allow Cursor to search the entire codebase for the pertinent files. However, whenever I use that feature, the formatting of the response seems a bit different, and sometimes it has trouble identifying the relevant files.

To work with what you give it, and it will sometimes hallucinate if you don't tag the relevant files instead of asking you to provide that code. One additional feature that Cursor has, which Windsurf does not, is the ability to tag documentation through a URL or to upload documents so that Cursor can use that as context. Overall, I would give Cursor about a seven in context awareness. Again, this is on a scale where 10 represents the perfect AI tool that can generate large pieces of software for you and deploy them immediately based on a simple conversation. It is a very high bar, and I expect that tools will evolve towards a maximum score over time. Now, looking at Windsurf, I think it shares a lot of similarities with Cursor. You are able to tag relevant files just like in Cursor and pull in the context.

One thing Windsurf does differently is that it actually opens up the files and analyzes them to pick out the relevant bits and pieces, instead of dumping the entire file into the context. This approach sometimes gives it an advantage in terms of being aware of what's going on. Another advantage that Windsurf has is that it does a better job of identifying relevant files across your codebase. You can type in a prompt without tagging the files, and it will find the relevant files and use that context when generating code. This is definitely better than Cursor, but sometimes it will still find irrelevant files or get sidetracked, so it's not a perfect solution either. Although it is missing the ability to reference documentation and URLs, I do think the automatic retrieval gives Windsurf a bit of a boost, so it also lands at a score of 7. Moving on to output quality, this is something that depends a lot on the AI model you're using, but the prompt engineering and the way these tools hook everything up do have an impact on that output process.

Quality. Additionally, the autocomplete feature used when you're editing code line by line is typically a model created by the tool. For example, Cursor has its own autocomplete model, which does a remarkable job of identifying where you need to modify the code. It even allows you to tab between those different sections. I have noticed that it performs this function reliably, and when it does, it generally understands what you want to achieve.

However, sometimes it does go a little bit off the rails and becomes a distraction when you're trying to write some code manually. The results you get in the chat aren't perfect either, especially if you're dealing with a particularly novel type of problem that it hasn't encountered before in its training data. You will run into issues if you're dealing with a really large file; it starts forgetting and not understanding things because the context is too long. It begins to get confused, which is why, although I would say it offers the best question quality that you can get out of an AI code editor right now, I still give it a 7 out of 10 for the output quality. Windsurf, as I've mentioned before, also uses Claude Sonnet 3.5, so it's not that far off, but it does struggle a little bit more often. The autocomplete functionality does not work as well as Cursor's, and after using it hands-on, I've found that, for whatever reason, even the code that comes out of Cascade, which is the chat sidebar, is not quite as high quality as what Cursor generates.

I have a feeling this is because of the way they manage the context that they pass into the prompt and the prompt engineering that is under the hood of this actual tool. It does become a subtle sort of difference that's hard to identify unless you've been using the tool for a while. Considering those issues, as well as the autocomplete output quality, I would give Windsurf a 5 out of 10 in this category. However, there is a point where Windsurf shines, and that is in its autonomy and agentic capabilities. We'll get to that shortly because Cursor does not have many autonomous capabilities.

There's no sort of agent behavior or flow back and forth within Cursor, and the capabilities it does have are generally reserved for generating long-form outputs. In those cases, I do think there's a little bit of a chain going on, which is why I don't give it a zero. I give Cursor a two in this category because I believe it can recognize when the response needs to keep going, so it generates additional messages to answer your question. It can also search the codebase for relevant files and pass that information on to generate some additional code. However, these are very basic and rudimentary agentic capabilities. In contrast, Windsurf really takes it to the next level in terms of what's possible today and has a lot more back and forth. You make a request, and it's going to analyze different files and pull out the relevant information.

And if it thinks it needs additional files, it's going to retrieve them and incorporate that context. So, it's much more independent in that way than Cursor. After that, it will generate some code and identify if you need dependencies; it will also provide an additional step where you can run the installation command for them. There is a lot more of this kind of iterative flow with Windsurf, but it does require you to be engaged for extended periods of time.

It's a very involved sort of back-and-forth process. It's not like the original Devon promo videos, where it focuses on building something for hours. Instead, it's a continuous exchange, taking multiple steps at a time and then asking for your feedback. While I do think it's a really effective loop, it's not going out and building a full application for you or making a lot of decisions independently; it still requires you to be very much engaged in the process. Therefore, I give Windsurf an autonomy score of 6 out of 10.

And that closes out our intelligence category. So right now we have Cursor at a total of 16 points out of 30, and Windsurf at 18. Again, just as a reminder, this is benchmarking against an ideal piece of software, so don't expect the scores to be near the top. These are some of the best tools available right now. Moving on to the acceleration category.

And this really has to do with how much faster this tool actually makes you go. How much code can you output now thanks to this tool? We have two interrelated items in this category: one is the iteration size, and then we will talk about the iteration speed. For iteration size, I think both tools operate at a similar level of abstraction, where you are really best off thinking about feature-level functionality. You might want to modify multiple files all at once, which is impressive because this takes us much further than some of the code completion or function writing tools, like you might see with GitHub Copilot. This is truly going above and beyond and building entire features.

Now they're still limited. They're not building super complicated things, and they're not building multiple microservices with one prompt. I found that both tools work best at that sort of function-level implementation. That might touch multiple files, but nothing too complicated all in one go. So, I give them both a seven in this category.

But when it comes to iteration speed, I think Cursor has a slight edge over Windsurf because, as soon as you put in the prompt, it starts generating code for you. So generally, it just seems to be outputting more code in the same amount of time. Finally, going back to the autocomplete feature, I find that when you have to go into the weeds and start modifying code, Cursor's autocomplete really wins out and allows you to modify things more quickly. Windsurf is not bad by any means in terms of completion speed; it's using the same underlying model, but I think it gets a little slowed down because it looks into each of the files that you mention.

And sometimes it will pull in additional files, so you're just left waiting a little bit longer for it to generate the full output. For this reason, I would give Cursor a 6 and Windsurf a 5 in terms of iterative speed. To round out the acceleration category, we have the capabilities.

And this is really meant to capture all of the features that help speed you up and enable you to get more done. In this case, I think Cursor has a lot of really nice features, like the ability to upload images. I know this is something that the Windsurf team wants to add as well, but Cursor already has it. They also allow you, very critically, to reference documentation and paste URLs that Cursor will reference when it's writing the code. This becomes super helpful when you have official documentation that you want it to use, and you don't want to go copy-pasting certain chunks of the code.

You can just tag the documents, and it's going to be able to start using that. Additionally, I think Cursor does a better job of allowing you to apply and see the different changes that the AI made, so it's really clear what code it changed as you're making it happen. Those changes, and if you undo, you're able to see that kind of diff state instead of just going back to what you previously had. This is another area that Windsurf is working on, but it's just not there yet. Now, in the capabilities category, I'm also thinking about things that are going to speed up the entire development lifecycle, not just the coding piece. A big part of building software products is actually getting them deployed, getting the infrastructure ready, resolving all the issues related to the domain name, or getting into the app store. There are some tools, like Replit, for example, that really focus on that area and try to make it as easy as possible to go from actual code to functional code out in production.

Cursor doesn't solve any of those kinds of things. So overall, in the capabilities category, I think Cursor deserves a score of 6. I've already mentioned many of the capabilities that Windsurf has, but I will highlight a couple more. One is that Windsurf offers a convenient way to navigate through different files that have been modified. It features a small bar that you can click through to easily see the various files.

I do like that. Its ability to run terminal commands and then continue iterating on the request you made is also pretty neat. Similar to Cursor, Windsurf does not handle any of the deployment and lifecycle aspects of the development process. However, Windsurf does have some cool unique features. I think a lot of it is accounted for in the agent capabilities and functionality that we talked about earlier.

So, all in all, I give Windsurf a 4 out of 10 in the capabilities category. I think it's a very new product, and I believe they will be adding a lot of features, so I'm excited to see this number go up over time. Overall for acceleration, we have Cursor at 19 and Windsurf at 16. Summing everything up so far, Cursor has a slight lead with 35 versus 34.

This brings us to the experience category, which is all about the developer experience of actually using the tools. First off, we have flexibility: how flexible is the tool? Can you use it with a variety of languages, different AI models, and different extensions? Can you get the code out of there? These tools have a lot of similarities in this aspect because they're both forks of VS Code, so they all have the same VS Code extensions that you can enable. They run locally, so you're working with your files. They also have the capability to use multiple different models, but Cursor does have a couple of small advantages over Windsurf in this category. One is that they have something called Cursor Rules, which allows you to configure how you want the AI to behave.

It's essentially like a system prompt that gets passed on to Cursor whenever you ask it questions. This makes it easy for Cursor to remember that it should always use a particular framework or design approach when generating your code. For Windsurf, you would have to specify that with every prompt. Although I've seen some people suggest creating a to-do list or a special kind of text file and then referencing that with every request, which is an interesting approach. It's kind of a workaround, right?

But it does seem to work. Additionally, Cursor has the ability to actually use API keys that you pass into it for the LLM models, and you can add your own models as well. So, although Windsurf does have a variety of models pre-packaged—some of the ones you are probably most likely to use—Cursor does give you a little bit more customization on that front. Overall, both tools are very extensible since, again, they are forks of VS Code. Given those couple of little advantages, I give Cursor a 7 out of 10 and Windsurf a 6 out of 10 in terms of flexibility.

Next up, we have ease of use. On the flip side of being code forks, you’re somewhat expected to be an experienced developer. If someone who knows nothing about coding opens one of these programs, they’re likely to feel overwhelmed. There’s a sidebar with all the files, a terminal, numerous menu options, a chat feature, and, of course, the code itself. There’s a lot going on.

And it's good for an experienced developer, but for somebody who's new, it's kind of difficult to go through all of that. With this category, I'm really trying to balance the two because it is important for an experienced developer to be able to use all of these different features whenever they need them. So, it's not enough to just have a super minimal product that doesn't allow you to do all of these things. However, I do think it's a little difficult to get your mind around if you're a beginner and to get started with this stuff and figure out where everything is. Therefore, I give Cursor a five out of ten in terms of ease of use.

I do think Windsurf does a slightly better job with this because it has all the commands that you might need to install packages and prepare your environment. It's all in that cascading chat. So it is a bit more user-friendly in that way because you can simply press the button there. You don't have to figure out how to open the terminal, how to paste, and run all these different commands. It actually handles more of that for you.

So, I’d say it’s a little bit better in that regard. I give it a 6 out of 10 for ease of use. Finally, from the experience perspective, we come to reliability. How consistent are these tools in generating the output that you want and not breaking things?

This is really one of Cursor's strongest points and why it's been my main code editor for the last eight or nine months: because it just gets stuff done. Like a lot of the other tools, you know, you’ll have hit or miss situations, where it will generate the code sometimes, or sometimes there will be an error, or it will delete something. Cursor is generally very consistent in terms of its reliability, the code that it generates, and how it functions. Yes, sometimes you'll encounter a situation where it removes some of the code, and it doesn't always have the highest quality, as we discussed regarding the output quality earlier on.

But in terms of being reliable, I think this is a very strong solution. The code it generates is quite consistent. There are not a lot of bugs; there are some, but not many. It even handles situations like when Claude is down and switches over to using OpenAI's API to generate code with that.

It has several failover mechanisms that make it very reliable. Overall, I would give Cursor an eight out of ten in this category. Windsurf is a brand new product, and you can't expect it to be perfect; in some cases, it's not. It does throw errors more often in the chat.

Sometimes, Windsurf will encounter issues when looking at files or running certain commands. One of the most frustrating problems I've run into is when I try to undo some of my changes. Sometimes, it just jumbles the lines together, and I end up in a situation where I can't seem to manage it. I redo an action, then undo it, and everything becomes mixed up. This makes it a significant challenge to iterate on things when facing such problems. I've also experienced situations in a very large codebase where I was unable to undo certain actions. Ultimately, it has been more hit or miss with some of the features I wanted it to perform.

Sometimes they would do something really huge and do it well. Other times, I would ask it to perform a very minimal task, and it would struggle with it. It felt a bit inconsistent overall. I think if they focus on getting those big things done effectively while also ensuring that all the little tasks are completed consistently, we could see a significant improvement. Additionally, fixing the bugs is important; it's a new product, so that's understandable. However, given its current state, I would rate it a five out of ten in terms of reliability.

So, in total for the experience category, we have Cursor at a 20 and Windsurf at a 17. Let's close this out by discussing the value and pricing of these tools. Both of these tools offer a free tier, but it does not include some of the most powerful and important features that you really want to utilize. Therefore, you will need a pro plan for each of these tools to get the most value out of them.

And both of them come in at a pretty good price, I would say. Cursor is $20 a month, and for that price, you get 500 fast requests, which basically means it immediately starts generating code. Beyond that, you get slow requests, which basically means you're just in a queue to get your question answered. I personally have only hit that a few times, and I code very regularly. I did expand my plan to $40 a month so that I never run into that issue anymore, but even when you do, it's really not that bad. You end up waiting, I don't know, 5 to 10 seconds, and then it'll generate the code. The cool thing is that for $20 a month, you're essentially getting unlimited AI generations, which is a really good deal. Think about how much time you're saving. If you save at least an hour of work a month, then it effectively pays for itself.

So, to me, although there is a dollar price on this tool, it is very reasonable in terms of what it's able to accomplish. I give Cursor an eight out of ten in this category because, again, it's one of the top tools. The value you're getting for that twenty dollars a month is just undeniable.

Oh, and one other thing is that you are able to bring your own API key for services like Claude and OpenAI. So, it will actually use your API key when calling those APIs. However, one of the biggest features in Cursor is the ability to apply the code it generates to the code you are viewing, and that feature isn't included unless you have a Pro plan. So, although the API key option might be a good way to explore, I don't think it's the best way to actually use the tool.

Now, Windsurf is actually half the price of Cursor. So, if you are price sensitive, I think it could be a good idea to start with this one. It does have a thousand steps per month limit with that plan, and I'm not exactly sure what happens when you reach that point. Their pricing is not very clear in terms of how you could potentially expand that. As you've seen over the course of this video, Windsurf is obviously a very capable tool.

So I think it's very much worth the $10 each month to be able to generate all of this code, especially with all of these agentic capabilities. You don't have the ability to submit your own API keys, and the limit is a little unclear, but the price is very good. Overall, Windsurf has the same score as Cursor at an 8 out of 10. So totaling up all of the scores, we have Cursor at a final score of 63 out of 100 and Windsurf at a 59 out of 100.

Again, a reminder that this is benchmarked against what a perfect solution would look like—one that can generate entire stacks of software fully deployed, enterprise-grade, with payments and everything set up, just after one brief conversation. Since the Volo score sets such a high bar for these tools, I also wanted to create a normalized score that compares each tool to the best current competitor. So far, I have only compared these two products: Cursor, which has a normalized score of 100, and Windsurf, which has a normalized score of 93.7. Both are fantastic tools. In some cases, Cursor may be better simply because it can more reliably get things done and its inline autocomplete is more effective. In other instances, Windsurf might help speed you up by offering more autonomous capabilities. If you want to see these tools in action, check out the hands-on tutorials where I showcase many of the features and demonstrate what the tools are really capable of. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you there. Take care!