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

about a week ago I started using a new AI code editor called windsurf and I've been using cursor up to this point maybe for about eight or nine months so I'm very comfortable and familiar with it but this new one had some really cool new features that I wanted to check out I wanted to compare the two editors to each other and show you some of the differences between them and also give some recommendations on when you might use one or the other and in planning this video I realized that I needed to have a

better way of evaluating varus AI Cod 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 wind surf keep in mind that both of these tools are Forks of VSS 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 manner additionally this also means that they're going to share a lot of similarities in terms of how they handle extensions settings what sort of Integrations they support and all of that kind of stuff that being said there are some key differences so let's look into those starting off with the intelligence category and first we're looking at the context awareness how well do these tools understand your intent and which files they need to modify and what sort of changes they need to make so I

film this video I'm editing it and guess what happens cursor releases a huge new version where they add a bunch of agentic capabilities now this just goes to show you how quickly things evolve in the AI coding space and I decided to keep this video as is comparing version 42 of cursor to wind Surf and then I'll spend some time working with version 43 and give an updated review so this review does not include the new agentic capabilities that cursor added in version 43 when it comes to cursor you're able to tag specific files to

give it the context that it needs to be able to modify the relevant code you can also make requests that are going to allow cursor to search the entire code base for the relevant files but whenever I use that feature it seems to kind of format the response a little differently and sometimes has trouble identifying the relevant files cursor 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 wind surf does not

is the ability to tag documentation through a URL or being able to upload documents so that cursor can use that as context so overall I would give cursor about a seven on context awareness and again this is on a scale where 10 is basically the perfect AI tool that's going to be able to generate huge pieces of software for you get them immediately deployed just based on a simple conversation so it is a very high bar and I expect that tools will evolve towards a maximum score over time now looking at wind surf I think

it shares a lot of similarities with cursor you're able to tag relevant files just like in cursor and pull in the context um one thing when surf does differently is that it will actually open up the files and analyze them to pick out the relevant bits and pieces instead of kind of dumping the entire file into the context which sometimes gives it an advantage in terms of being aware of what's going on the other advantage that wind surf has is that it actually does a better job of identifying relevant files across your code base so

you can type in a prompt without tagging the files and it will actually find the relevant files and then use that context when it generates code so 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 wind surf a bit of a boost so it also lands at a seven moving on to Output quality this is something that does depend a lot on the AI

model you're using but the sort of prompt engineering and the way that these tools hook everything up does have an impact on that out output quality Additionally the autocomplete that is used when you're editing the code line by line is generally a model that is created by the tool so cursor has their own autocomplete model and this model actually does a really nice job of figuring out where you need to modify the code and it allows you to actually tab to those different sections I see it doing this pretty reliably and when it does that

it generally knows what you want to do however some sometimes it does go a little bit off the rails and become a distraction when you're trying to write some code manually and the results you get in the chat aren't perfect either especially if you're dealing with a particularly novel sort 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 so it starts to get confused which is why although it

is I would say the best quality that you can get out of an AI code editor right now I still give it a seven out of 10 for the output quality wind surf as I've said before also uses Claud Sonet 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 cursors and after really using it handson I found that for whatever reason even the code that comes out of Cascade which is the chat sidebar is not quite as good quality as

what cursor generates I have a feeling this is because of the way that they manage the context that they pass into the prompt and the prompt engineering that is under the hood of this actual tool so it does become a subtle sort of difference that's hard to tell unless you've been using the tool for a while so across those issues as well as the autocomplete uh output quality I would give wind surf a five out of 10 on this category but there is a place that wind surf shines and that is autonomy and the agentic

capabilities that it has and we'll get to that quickly here because cursor does not have a lot of autonomous capabilities there's no sort of agent Behavior or flow back and forth within cursor and the capabilities that it does have are generally reserved to generating long form outputs so 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 do think it can recognize when the response needs to keep going so it generates additional

messages to answer your question and it also can search the codebase for Relevant files and then be able to pass that on to generate some additional code but those are some very basic and rudimentary agentic capabilities whereas wind surf really takes it kind of to the next level in terms of what's possible today and really has a lot of back and forth so you make a request and it's going to analyze different files it's going to pull out the relevant information and if it thinks it needs additional files it's going to go get them and

it's going to put that context in so it's a lot more independent in that way than cursor and after that it's going to generate some code and it'll also identify if you need things like dependencies and it'll have an additional step where you can just run you know the installation command for that and then it'll keep going so there's a lot more of this kind of iterative flow with wind surf but it does require you to be in the loop for extended periods of time it's it's very involved sort of back and forth so it's

not like it's going out you know like the original Devon promo videos where it's just building something for hours it it's very much a back and forth but it's taking multiple steps at a time and then asking you for feedback so while I do think it's a really effective loop it's not like it's going out and building a full application for you and making a lot of decisions on its own it still requires you to be very much in the loop so I give wi surf an autonomy score of six 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 wind surf at 18 and 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 that are are available right now moving on to the acceleration category and this really has to do with how much faster does this thing actually make you go like how much code can you output now thanks to this tool so we

got two interrelated items in this category one of which is the iteration size and then we're going to talk about the iteration speed so for iteration size I think both tools work on a similar level of abstraction where you are really best off thinking about featur level uh function it where you might want to modify multiple files all at once which is pretty impressive because this takes us a lot further than some of the code completion or function writing stuff like you might see with GitHub co-pilot this is really 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 you know multiple microservices with one prompt so I found that both tools work best at that sort of function level implementation that might touch multiple files but you know nothing too complicated all in one go uh 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 winds surf 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 time finally going back to the autocomplete 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 wind surf 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 talk about and sometimes it will pull in additional files so you're just left waiting for a little

bit longer for it to generate the full output so for this reason I would give cursor a six and wind surf a five on the iteration speed and 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 just be able to get more done uh in this case I think cursor has a lot of really nice features like the ability to upload images and I know this is something that the wind surf team wants to add as well but

cursor already has it and they also allow you very critically to reference documentation and paste URLs that cursor is going to go and reference when it's writing the code this becomes super helpful when you have some official documentation that you want it to just use and you don't want to go copy pasting certain chunks of the code you can just tag the docs 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 changed as you're making those changes and then if you undo you're able to see that kind of diff State instead of just going back to what you previously had uh this is another area that wind surf 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 life cycle not just the coding piece because a big part of building software products is actually getting it deployed getting the infrastructure ready resolving all the things

about you know the domain name or getting in the App Store and there are some tools like repet 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 gets a six and I've already mentioned a lot of the capabilities that wind surf has I will mention a couple more which is that they do have a really convenient way to navigate through

different files that it modified it has a little bar that you can click through see the different files very easily I do like that and its ability to run terminal commands and then continue iterating on the request you made is also pretty neat and similar to cursor winds surf also does not handle any of that kind of deployment and life cycle uh aspects of development process so wind surf does have some cool unique features I think a lot of it is accounted for in that autonomy and agenta capabilities uh functionality that we talked about earlier

so all in all I give wind surf a four out of 10 in the capabilities category I think it's a very new product I think they're going to be adding a lot of features so I'm excited to see this number go up over time so overall for acceleration we got cursor at 19 and wind surf at 16 and summing everything up so far cursor has a slight lead at 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 different extensions can you get the code out of there um you know these tools have a lot of similarity 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're running locally so you're working with your file they have the capability to use multiple different models uh but cursor does have a couple of small advantages on wind surf 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 to make cursor remember that it should always use a particular framework or a particular design approach when it is generating your code for wind surf you would have to kind of specify that on every prompt although I've seen some people make suggestions of creating like a to-do or special kind of text file and then just referencing that on every request which is

an interesting approach it 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 wind surf does have a variety of models prepackaged some of the ones you probably are most likely to use uh cursor does give you a little bit more customization on that front but overall both tools are very extensible since again they are Forks of vs code uh but given those couple of

little advantages I give cursor a 7 out of 10 and wind surf a six out of 10 on the flexibility front next up we have ease of use go into the flip side of being vs code Forks you're kind of expected to be somewhat experienced of a developer like if somebody who knows nothing about code opens one of these things up they're going to get overwhelmed you know there's a sidebar with all the files there's a terminal there's a bunch of menu options there's a chat there's the code like there's a lot of stuff going

on and it's good for an experiened developer but for somebody who's new it's kind of difficult to to go through all of that and 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 these things but on the balance sheet I do think it's a little bit difficult to get your mind around if you're a beginner and

to get started with this stuff and figure out where everything is so I give uh cursor a five out of 10 in terms of ease of use I do think wind surf does a little bit of a better job with this because it has all the commands that you might run to do things like installing packages and preparing your environment it's all in that Cascade chat so it is a little bit more user friendly in that way because you can just kind of press the button there you don't have to figure out how to open

up the terminal how to paste and run all these different commands uh it's going to actually handle more of that for you so I'd say it's a little bit better on that one so I give it six out of 10 for ease of use and finally from The Experience perspective we come to reliability how consistent are these tools in terms of actually 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 like it'll generate the code sometimes or sometimes it'll have an error or it'll delete something cursor is generally very consistent uh in terms of its reliability in terms of the code that it generates and in terms of how it functions yes sometimes you'll get a situation where it removes some of the code and it doesn't always have the highest quality right like we discussed the output quality earlier on but in terms of being reliable I think this is

a very strong solution the code that it generates is quite consistent there are not a lot of bugs there are some but not a lot and it even handles things like you know claw being down and it switches over to using open ai's API uh and generating code with that so it has a lot of like failover mechanisms uh that just generally make it very reliable so overall I would give cursor an eight out of 10 in this category uh wind surf it's a brand new product you can't expect it to be perfect and in

some cases it's not uh I have found that it does throw errors more often in the chat sometimes wind surf will run into some issues looking at files or running certain commands and one of the most frustrating issues I've run into is when I try to undo some of my changes sometimes it just kind of like jumbles the lines together and I end up in a situation where I can't like I redo it and then I undo it and every everything just gets jumbled up so it becomes a real big pain to to iterate on

things when you're running into those kinds of problems I've also seen situations where in a very large code base like I was not able to undo certain actions and finally it was more hit or miss on some of the things that I wanted it to do like sometimes it would do something really huge really well and then other times I would ask it to do this like very minimal thing and it would struggle with it um so it was just a little bit more all over the place I think if they get it more into

that direction of getting those big things done effectively and all the little things consistently being done you know we could really see a huge Improvement here as well as just fixing the bugs which again it's a new product it's understandable but given where it is right now I would give it a five out of 10 in terms of reliability so in total for the experience category we have cursor at a 20 and wind surf at a 17 so let's close this out by talking about the value and the pricing of these tools both of these

tools do have a free tier but it does not include some of the most powerful and important features that you're really trying to get out of these tools so you really do need a Pro Plan for each of these to get your value out of it and both of them come in at a pretty good price I would say cursor is 20 bucks a month and for that price you get 500 Fast requests which basically just means it immediately starts generating code beyond that you get slow request uh which which basically means you're just in

a Quee to get that question answered I personally have only hit that a few times and I code very regularly I did expand my plan to go to 40 bucks a month so that I just never run into that issue anymore um but even when you do it's really not that bad you end up waiting for I don't know 5 10 seconds and then it'll generate the code the cool thing is you're basically at 20 bucks a month getting unlimited AI Generations uh which is really a good deal like if think about how much time

you're saving and if you save what at least an hour of work a month then it pays for itself effectively so to me although there is a dollar price on this thing it is very reasonable in terms of what it's able to actually accomplish so I give cursor an eight out of 10 in this category just because again it's it's one of the top tools so the value that you're getting for that 20 bucks 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 open AI so it actually will use your API key when it's calling those apis however one of the biggest features in cursor is the ability to apply the code that it generates to the code that you're viewing and that isn't included unless you have a Pro Plan so although the API key thing might be a good way to just poke around I don't think it's the best way to actually use the tool now now wind surf 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 uh it does have a th steps a 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 and as you've seen over the course of this video obviously wind surf is a very capable tool so I think it's very much worth the $10 a month to be able to generate all of this code and especially for 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 so overall wind surf 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 wind surf 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 uh you know Enterprise grade with payments and everything set up

just in after one little conversation since the Volo score does set such a high bar for these tools I did want to also create a normalized score that compares each tool to the best current competitor and since these two are the only products that I've compared so far I have Cur CS at a normalized score of 100 and wind surf at a normalized score of 93.7 so again two Fantastic Tools in some cases cursor is going to be better just because it's able to more reliably get things done and the inline auto complete is more

effective in other cases wind surf might help speed you up by having more of those autonomous capabilities now if you want to see these tools in action check out these Hands-On tutorials where I show you a lot of the features and what the tools are really capable of thanks for watching and I'll see you there take care