Cursor vs Windsurf vs Cline: What the Devin Rebrand Changed

Any cursor vs windsurf comparison written before June 2026 describes a product that no longer exists under that name. Windsurf became Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026, and as of August 3, 2026 windsurf.com returns an HTTP 308 permanent redirect to devin.ai/desktop. That matters more than a rename usually would, because the three editors in this comparison have converged on price and features for individuals and diverged almost completely at team scale — which is the part no feature table shows. Every figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing page today.

Key takeaways

• Windsurf is Devin Desktop as of June 2, 2026; windsurf.com now 308-redirects to devin.ai/desktop, so a large share of ranking comparisons point at a dead pricing page.
• For individuals all three start at effectively the same place: Cursor Pro and Devin Pro are both $20/month, and Cline is free.
• At team scale they separate sharply — Cursor Teams is $40/user/month flat, while Devin Teams is $80/month base plus $40 per developer seat.
• That base fee means Devin costs $80/month more than Cursor at every team size: 2× the per-head price for two developers, narrowing to about 10% more at twenty.
• Cline shipped v4.1.3 on August 2, 2026 and is Apache-2.0, so it has no seat price at any team size — you carry the API key and the spend cap instead.

The short answer in August 2026

Three recommendations, one per situation.

• You are one developer who lives in an editor — Cursor Pro, $20/month. The tightest inline loop of the three, and the reason it is the default recommendation for editor-first work in our full comparison.
• You run several agents at once — Devin Desktop Pro, $20/month. It now opens on an agent command centre rather than an editor canvas, which is a genuine difference in product thesis rather than a skin.
• You want no seat price, or your code cannot leave the network — Cline, free and Apache-2.0, pointed at your own key or a local model.

If you are buying for a team rather than yourself, skip to the team-scale section: the individual comparison genuinely does not predict it.

What happened to Windsurf

Cognition rebranded Windsurf as Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026. The announcement was explicit that continuity was preserved — "your plan, pricing, extensions, and other features remain the same," and the editor stays "backwards-compatible with Windsurf and VSCode." An existing install keeps working, and existing plans carried across.

What moved is the name, the domain, and the product's centre of gravity. Devin Desktop opens on an agent command centre for managing multiple agents rather than on the editor canvas Windsurf led with. That is the change worth knowing about: the product you may remember was an editor with an agent bolted on, and the product you would buy today is an agent manager that contains an editor.

Cursor vs Windsurf on individual pricing

For a single developer, cursor vs windsurf is close to a tie on price, and both publish their tiers in relative rather than absolute terms above the entry plan.

Both read from each vendor's pricing page on August 3, 2026.

Two things are worth noticing. Cursor describes Pro+ and Ultra as multiples of Pro's agent limits rather than publishing a second and third price, so you cannot budget those tiers from the pricing page alone — the same complaint we made about its free tier's undisclosed quota. Devin publishes a flat $200 for Max, which is easier to plan against but a much larger single step up.

Devin's free tier is the more generous of the two on paper: unlimited inline edits and Tab completions, with the quota applying to agent requests. Cursor's Hobby tier states "Limited Agent requests" and "Access to Composer" with no number attached to either.

Where the three diverge at team scale

This is the section the feature tables miss, and it is the one that should decide a purchase. Cursor Teams is $40 per user per month with no platform fee. Devin Teams is $80 per month plus $40 per full developer seat. Same per-seat number, different structure.

The arithmetic follows directly:

Devin is $80/month more than Cursor at every size — the absolute gap never closes, it just stops mattering. For a two-person team it is double the per-head cost. By twenty developers it is a 10% premium, which is well inside the range a genuine workflow preference should override.

So the decision rule is unusually clean. Under about five developers, the base fee is the argument — pick Cursor unless the agent command centre is something you specifically need. Above ten, ignore the price difference and choose on how your team actually works.

Cline sits outside this table entirely, because there is no seat to buy at any size. Both paid options also gate the governance controls a team eventually needs behind their top tier: Cursor's Enterprise adds pooled usage, SCIM, and advanced access controls, and Devin's Enterprise adds SAML/OIDC SSO and centralised admin. If those are requirements rather than nice-to-haves, the security and compliance questions come first and narrow the shortlist before pricing does.

Cline vs Cursor is a different question

Comparing cline vs cursor on features misses what actually separates them, which is who carries the operational burden. Cursor sells you a managed product: the key, the model routing, the spend ceiling, and the uptime are theirs. Cline is Apache-2.0 and free to install, and every one of those is yours.

That trade is genuinely good for some teams and genuinely bad for others.

• Cline wins when code cannot leave your network — point it at a local model — or when your usage is spiky enough that a per-seat fee is poor value, or when you want the agent's behaviour to be inspectable.
• Cursor wins when you want one invoice, no spend-cap incident, and someone else to call when a provider degrades. That is worth $40/user to most teams and it is not an unreasonable price.

The honest failure mode for Cline at team scale is that "free" moves cost from a predictable line item to an unpredictable one. An API key with no spend cap is the single most common way a bring-your-own-key rollout produces a surprise, and it is a configuration mistake rather than a tooling one. The wider open source comparison covers where Cline sits against Aider and Continue.

Release cadence still separates them

With features converged, shipping rate is one of the few signals left that a comparison can actually measure rather than assert. Cline publishes its releases, so it can be checked directly:

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/cline/cline/releases?per_page=1
# → v4.1.3   2026-08-02T05:41:27Z

Cline shipped the day before this article was written. That is consistent with what we found on August 1, 2026, when it was also shipping releases daily — and it is the sharpest available contrast with Aider, which has not shipped since 0.86.2 on February 12, 2026.

Cursor and Devin Desktop are closed source, so no equivalent public feed exists and this signal simply cannot be measured for them. That is a limit of the method, not a mark against either product, and any comparison implying otherwise is guessing.

Looking for a windsurf alternative

If you are searching for a windsurf alternative, first check which problem you actually have, because two different ones send you to different places.

If the problem is the rebrand itself — you want the editor you had, not an agent command centre — Cursor is the closest surviving equivalent to what Windsurf was in 2025: editor-first, inline diffs, $20/month. Your existing Windsurf install also still works, since the rebrand preserved backwards compatibility.

If the problem is price or vendor independence, the alternative is not another editor at all. Cline removes the seat entirely, and if your work is more shell-shaped than editor-shaped, the terminal-versus-editor comparison is the more useful read — a large share of people shopping for an editor alternative are actually better served by a terminal agent.

How we checked this

Every price and tier on this page came from the vendor's own pricing page, read on August 3, 2026: cursor.com/pricing, devin.ai/pricing, and the Cline repository's public release feed. The rebrand redirect was verified the same day — windsurf.com returns an HTTP 308 permanent redirect to devin.ai/desktop, which is a correction to our own earlier record of that capture, where we noted the destination as the site root.

The team-cost table is arithmetic on the two vendors' published figures, not a quoted number: Cursor Teams at $40/user, Devin Teams at $80/month plus $40 per developer seat, multiplied out across team sizes. You can reproduce it from those two pages.

What this page is not. None of the three editors was installed for this comparison, and nothing here is a hands-on quality verdict. The claims are about published pricing, published release metadata, and a live redirect — all checkable, none of them a substitute for using the products. Where a judgement would require running them side by side on the same task, we have left it open rather than filled it in. Our first-hand experience in this category is with Claude Code, which built this site, and that is documented separately rather than smuggled into a verdict here.

Common mistakes comparing AI editors

• Reading a pre-June comparison as current. The single biggest source of wrong information about this trio. If it says "Windsurf" with a price and never says "Devin Desktop", it has not been re-checked since the rebrand.
• Assuming per-seat prices are comparable. Cursor and Devin both charge $40 per developer seat, and the total differs by $80/month because one of them also charges a platform fee.
• Pricing a team from the individual tiers. Individual pricing is a tie; team pricing is not. The tier you evaluate must be the tier you will buy.
• Treating "free" as free. Cline has no licence cost and a real model bill. The mistake is not choosing it, it is choosing it without setting a spend cap on day one.
• Comparing on features. They converged during 2026 — every one of these ships an agent, model selection, and a project config file. Where each one runs and how it meters you is what is left.
• Ignoring that Continue is now Cursor-owned. If vendor independence is why you are shopping, that acquisition changes the shape of the open source shortlist.

Conclusion

For one developer, pick Cursor if you want the tighter editor loop and Devin Desktop if you genuinely run several agents at once — at $20/month each, price does not break the tie. For a team under five, take Cursor: the $80 base fee on Devin's team plan doubles the per-head cost at that size and buys nothing a small team needs. Above ten developers the gap narrows to noise, so choose on workflow. And if the seat price is the objection rather than the product, Cline removes it entirely — provided you set the spend cap the same day you install it.

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Muhammad Kashif

Founder and editor of Devventa, covering AI coding assistants, Next.js and the modern AI development stack.