Devin vs Windsurf (now Devin Desktop)

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

	Devin Cognition's autonomous cloud software engineer that plans, codes, tests, and opens pull requests on its own.	Windsurf (now Devin Desktop) Agentic AI IDE acquired by Cognition in 2025 and rebranded Devin Desktop in June 2026.
Category	harness	harness
Vendor type	commercial	commercial
Pricing	freemium	freemium
Strengths	+ Fully autonomous cloud sessions that run tasks end to end without local setup + Access to multiple frontier model families plus Cognition's own SWE models + Quota-based plans scale from a free tier to high-usage Max and Teams tiers	+ Full IDE experience with agent, tab completion, and multi-file edits integrated + Backed by Cognition's proprietary SWE coding models plus frontier model access + Free tier available; settings and extensions carried over from Windsurf
Tradeoffs	− Works best on well-scoped tasks; practitioners report mixed results on ambiguous or large refactors − Quota allowances can deplete quickly on long autonomous runs, pushing users to API-priced top-ups − Closed source with less interactive steering than pair-programming style CLI agents	− Closed source and tied to Cognition's platform and credit quotas − 2025-2026 ownership changes and the Devin rebrand forced workflow migrations (e.g. Cascade deprecation)
Used in stacks	0	0