Windsurf Became Devin Desktop: How It Compares to Cursor

Is Windsurf Still Around?

Not under that name, and not as a standalone company. Windsurf itself was Codeium's rebrand from April 2025. Cognition's own acquisition announcement, dated July 14, 2025, states Cognition "signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf, the agentic IDE."

The product itself did not go dark during that year. It kept shipping as Windsurf under new ownership until Cognition's Devin Desktop announcement on June 2, 2026, which opens: "We're excited to announce Devin Desktop, the next generation of Windsurf." That is the current product, and it is what any "Windsurf vs Cursor" search is now actually comparing against.

• July 14, 2025 - Cognition signs the agreement to acquire Windsurf.
• June 2, 2026 - Windsurf ships as Devin Desktop, the current product name.
• Backwards-compatible by Cognition's own statement - existing Windsurf installs updated in place rather than requiring a fresh signup.

What Actually Changed

More than a new coat of paint on the old Windsurf editor. Cognition's announcement frames Devin Desktop around an "Agent Command Center," positioned to "plan, delegate, review, and ship without leaving your editor" across "fleets of local and cloud agents."

Two specific, verifiable changes matter more than the rename itself:

• Agent Client Protocol (ACP) support - Cognition's own wording: "Any ACP-compatible agent can run inside Devin Desktop alongside Devin," opening the editor to agents beyond Cognition's own.
• Cascade reached end-of-life - Windsurf's original local agent, Cascade, was retired on July 1, 2026, roughly a month after the Devin Desktop launch, per Digital Applied's report on the migration.

The same report describes existing Windsurf settings, plans, extensions, keybindings, and MCP connections porting over automatically when a user's editor updated after the June 2 release, so the transition for existing users was designed to be invisible day-to-day even though the underlying product changed considerably.

Where They Differ Today

The pre-rebrand comparisons still ranking for this keyword measure two single-agent editors against each other. That comparison no longer describes the current products.

The practical question shifted with the product. It used to be "which single agent writes better code." It is now closer to "do you want one focused agent, or a command center coordinating several."

How the Agents Actually Work

Devin Desktop's session view is built around managing several running agents at once, each tracked as a session with its own status: working, waiting for review, or done, alongside a shared task board and pull request links.

Cursor's agent runs inside the editor's own panel, one session at a time, with the same account and model access it shares with Cursor CLI when you switch to the terminal. Cursor's own documentation lets you choose the model per session with a --model flag, the same mechanism the CLI exposes.

Neither difference is a defect. A team running one well-scoped task at a time gets little extra value from a fleet manager. A team parallelizing several independent tasks, three reviewers on one PR, or several small fixes at once, gets real value from Devin Desktop's command-center model that a single-agent editor cannot offer without external tooling.

CI and Automation Support

Cursor's CI story is documented and specific. Cursor's own GitHub Actions documentation shows installing the CLI, exporting CURSOR_API_KEY from a repository secret, and invoking agent -p "<prompt>" --model gpt-5 in a workflow step. Our Cursor CLI guide covers the full flag reference, including the three output formats built for parsing in a pipeline.

Devin Desktop's own public documentation does not lay out an equivalent CI recipe as explicitly at the time of writing; its automation story centers on cloud agents dispatched from the desktop command center rather than a documented headless CLI invocation. If your workflow specifically needs a scriptable, CI-triggerable agent command today, Cursor's documented path is the more concrete option to build against right now.

Can You Trust the Output?

For code-level claims, both are reasonably trustworthy: a change either agent reports is usually a change that actually exists in the diff, and a test command it ran either passed or it didn't.

Neither closes the gap that matters most for shipped features: confirming a page renders, a form submits, or a redirect lands where it should. Both are code-surface tools, however many agents Devin Desktop is coordinating at once. Kane CLI from TestMu AI fills that gap identically from either side: a plain-English objective, a real Chrome browser, and a standard exit code (0 passed, 1 failed, 2 environment error, 3 timeout) that a pull request check or a Devin Desktop task can gate on the same way it gates on a unit test.

A worked example of wiring that exact check into a pipeline step is in our guide to agent-native CI, written for the same class of problem: an agent's own report of success is not evidence a browser would agree.

Which Costs Less?

Both run per-seat subscription tiers, and both have changed those tiers within the last year, Windsurf's most recently during the Devin Desktop transition itself.

Printing specific dollar figures here would be stale within a quarter and would not survive the next pricing update either vendor ships. Check each vendor's own current pricing page directly before deciding; a comparison that quotes last year's numbers is worse than no comparison at all.

Which Should You Use?

Match the tool to the shape of the work, not to whichever name is more familiar.

• Choose Cursor - one task, one focused agent, a documented CI path already built for scripting today.
• Choose Devin Desktop - several independent tasks you want coordinated from one command center, or you want to run agents beyond Cognition's own through ACP.

Trial both against one real task in your own codebase before standardizing on either. Whichever wins, wire in a browser-level check before you trust its output on anything user-facing; start with the Kane CLI documentation to add that step.