Windsurf vs Cursor — A Few Weeks With Both on Real Work

I switched to Cursor a while back and wrote about it. Been using it since. But Windsurf kept coming up — specifically two things: people saying the free tier was more usable, and people saying the agentic features were better for longer tasks.

The free tier point matters to me. Most developers I know in India aren't paying ₹1500-2000/month for a code editor on top of everything else. If Windsurf's free tier is genuinely better, that's worth knowing.

The agentic point also mattered because I'd hit frustrating moments with Cursor's agent where it would ask me to confirm every small step when I just wanted it to go and do the thing. I gave Windsurf a real shot over a few weeks on a MERN project I was actively building.

Windsurf is made by Codeium — same company that makes the free GitHub Copilot alternative. It's a VS Code fork like Cursor, so your extensions and settings carry over. The AI feature they're known for is called Cascade, which is their agentic system.

Cascade can plan multi-step tasks, read your files, run terminal commands, and make changes across multiple files in one go. Think of it as Cursor's agent but with a different philosophy — Windsurf's Cascade tends to go further before stopping to ask.

Cursor free gives you 50 fast AI requests per month. That sounds like a lot until you're doing an active coding session and burn through 20 in a morning. After that you drop to slower requests and it gets annoying.

Windsurf free gives you 25 "flow actions" per day. Per day, not per month. For someone coding daily, that resets every morning and is usually enough for a normal workday.

If you're a student or a developer who doesn't want to pay for AI tools yet, this difference is the most important thing in this comparison. Windsurf free is more practically usable day-to-day.

I gave both tools the same task on the same MERN project: add a new POST route in Express, connect it to an existing Mongoose model, write the frontend fetch call in React, and update the loading state in the component that calls it.

Windsurf's Cascade did all of it in one go. One instruction, it planned the steps, made the changes across four files, ran correctly. I reviewed the diff, found one minor naming inconsistency it had introduced, told it to fix that, done.

Cursor's agent split the same task — asked me to confirm after each file. Not wrong, just slower. For a complex task touching many files, Windsurf's approach of going further before pausing felt better.

The flip side: when I gave Cursor a tight instruction — "only touch this one function, leave everything else" — it was more obedient. Windsurf has a tendency to improve nearby code it wasn't asked to touch. Sometimes helpful, sometimes annoying when you're mid-debugging and don't want unexpected changes.

Autocomplete on both is fast and context-aware. After a few days alternating between them I stopped noticing a difference in the basic completion quality. Cursor might suggest slightly longer completions. Windsurf feels slightly more precise. Neither is a reason to switch on its own.

Chat panel — both work well. One thing I actually prefer about Windsurf: it remembers context better within the same session. Cursor occasionally seems to lose track of what was discussed 15 messages ago in a long session. Windsurf maintained the thread better during multi-step tasks.

Keyboard shortcuts in Cursor feel more natural to me, but that's probably just habit from using it longer.

Both let you choose. Cursor offers Claude Sonnet, GPT-4o, and others. Windsurf uses Claude models plus their own Codeium models for autocomplete.

When both are running Claude Sonnet, the output quality is similar — you're comparing how each editor frames the context for the model, not the model itself. Both do this competently.

Windsurf's own models (not Claude) are good for autocomplete but for harder reasoning I'd pick Claude on either platform. The editor doesn't matter as much as which model you point it at for complex work.

If you're not paying for AI tools: start with Windsurf. The free tier is meaningfully better and Cascade is impressive at that price point. ₹0 per month for 25 solid AI actions per day is a better deal than Cursor's monthly cap.

If you're already on Cursor and happy: probably stay unless the agentic tasks you do regularly are the kind where Windsurf's "go further before asking" approach fits better. Migration friction is real.

My current setup is both open. Cursor for most work because the habits are built. Windsurf when I want an agent to take a longer task and run with it. Some freelance work I do involves creating new features from scratch where Windsurf's Cascade saves back-and-forth.

Try Windsurf on your current project for a week — it imports VS Code settings, takes 10 minutes. You'll know quickly whether the free tier difference is meaningful for how you work.