Devin vs Windsurf
A side-by-side comparison of capabilities, autonomy, integrations, and pricing to help you choose.
Short answer: choose Devin if you want autonomous ai software engineer that takes delegated tickets to a reviewed pr (Supervised agent, usage); choose Windsurf if you want agentic ai ide whose cascade agent edits across your codebase (Supervised agent, freemium).
| Devin | Windsurf | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Autonomous AI software engineer that takes delegated tickets to a reviewed PR | Agentic AI IDE whose Cascade agent edits across your codebase |
| Type | agent | agent |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Supervised agent |
| Pricing | usage · $20/mo + usage (ACU credits) | freemium · Free tier; Pro $20/mo |
| Best for | enterprise, mid-market, developers | developers, mid-market, enterprise |
| Deployment | saas, api | saas |
| Modalities | text, code, browser, api | text, code |
| Models | claude, proprietary | claude, proprietary, model-agnostic |
| Protocols | mcp, rest-api, function-calling | mcp, function-calling |
| Integrations | GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira | GitHub, MCP servers, VS Code extensions ecosystem, Devin |
| Capabilities | 4 documented | 3 documented |
Devin
- +Genuinely async, delegated model: handles whole tickets and large parallel migrations rather than line-by-line autocomplete
- +Deep workflow integration (Slack, Jira, Linear, GitHub) plus DeepWiki codebase indexing and a public API
- +Validated at large, complex enterprises
- -Best on clear, verifiable tasks; Cognition's own framing acknowledges it can make mistakes or get stuck on complex work and needs human review
- -Usage-based ACU billing can get expensive and unpredictable on open-ended work
Windsurf
- +Cascade does genuine multi-step, multi-file agentic work inside a familiar VS Code-style editor
- +Ships a fast in-house coding model (SWE-1.5) and can also run frontier models like Claude
- +After the Cognition acquisition, integrates Devin as a cloud agent for delegated tasks
- -Quota and credit changes after the acquisition have shifted what each tier includes
- -Multi-step agent runs still need human review; not a hands-off autonomous engineer
Which should you choose?
Devin is autonomous ai software engineer that takes delegated tickets to a reviewed pr, best for enterprise, mid-market, developers. Windsurf is agentic ai ide whose cascade agent edits across your codebase, best for developers, mid-market, enterprise. The right choice depends on the autonomy level you want, your existing integrations, and your budget, all compared above.