If you came looking for a three-way Cursor vs Windsurf vs GitHub Copilot comparison, start with this: one of those products no longer exists under that name. Cognition retired the Windsurf brand on June 2, 2026 and relaunched the editor as Devin Desktop. The old windsurf.com pricing page now redirects to Devin's. Any 2026 comparison still quoting Windsurf tiers is describing a page that has been gone for more than a month. Here is the head-to-head as it actually stands in July 2026, with every figure taken from the vendors' current pricing pages.
The Windsurf brand is retired
The path here was messy even by AI-industry standards. OpenAI's roughly $3 billion deal to buy Windsurf collapsed in mid-2025. Google then paid $2.4 billion in a licensing-and-hiring arrangement that took CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen and senior research staff to Google. Cognition — the company behind the Devin agent — acquired what remained of Windsurf on July 14, 2025, including the product, intellectual property, trademark and team. Terms were not disclosed.
For about a year the editor kept its name. That ended with Introducing Devin Desktop, Cognition's June 2, 2026 post describing the release as "the next generation of Windsurf." The rebrand is not cosmetic. The default interface is now the Agent Command Center, which manages local agents, cloud agents and pull requests in one view. Spaces let several agents share context on a task. The editor supports the Agent Client Protocol, so third-party agents can run inside it. Cognition says backward compatibility with Windsurf is preserved and existing users were migrated without action.
Cursor
Cursor remains the most conventional of the three: a VS Code fork where the AI is wired into the editor rather than bolted on. Cursor's pricing page currently lists four tiers — Hobby at $0 with limited Agent requests and Tab completions, Individual at $20 per month, Teams at $40 per user per month, and Enterprise at custom pricing.
The $20 Individual plan covers extended Agent limits, generous limits on Grok and Cursor's own Composer models, access to frontier third-party models, MCP servers, skills and hooks, and cloud agents. Bugbot, Cursor's code-review agent, is available on usage-based billing. Teams adds centralized billing, a marketplace for internal rules and plugins, agentic code review, shared team context for cloud agents, usage analytics and SAML/OIDC SSO. Enterprise adds pooled usage, SCIM seat management, repository and model access controls, audit logs and an AI code tracking API.
Cursor shipped steadily through 2026: Design Mode visual prompting in early June, an iOS client on June 29, a Cursor SDK that Notion used to embed coding agents, and Grok 4.5 on July 8. A June 10 post reported Bugbot running over 3x faster, 22% cheaper, and finding 10% more bugs.
Devin Desktop
Devin's pricing now covers the desktop editor. Free is $0 with a light agent-coding quota, limited model availability, and unlimited inline edits and Tab completions. Pro is $20 per month with higher quotas, access to OpenAI, Claude and Gemini models, free use of SWE-1.7 and open-source models, and Devin Cloud access — previously reserved for enterprise. Max is $200 per month for significantly higher quotas. Teams is structured differently from its rivals: $80 per month plus $40 per full developer seat, with unlimited team members. Enterprise is custom. Extra usage on paid plans is sold at API pricing.
The differentiator is Cognition's in-house model line. SWE-1.7, announced July 8, 2026, is described as the company's most capable model, aimed at long asynchronous engineering tasks. Cognition reports 42.3% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, 81.5% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 77.8% on SWE-Bench Multilingual, and serves the model through Cerebras at roughly 1,000 tokens per second. The speed claim, more than the benchmark scores, is what sets it apart. These are vendor-reported figures and have not been independently replicated.
GitHub Copilot
Copilot is the cheapest entry point and the only one of the three that is not an editor. GitHub's plans page lists Free at $0 with 2,000 completions and 50 chat requests per month using Haiku 4.5 and GPT-5 mini, Pro at $10 per month, Pro+ at $39, and Max at $100.
Paid tiers run on GitHub AI Credits: a $15 monthly allowance on Pro, $70 on Pro+ and $200 on Max, with code completions unlimited across all paid plans. Pro adds cloud agent, code review, agent mode and MCP server integration. Pro+ unlocks premium models including Opus, audit logs, and third-party agents such as Claude Code and Codex. Max adds priority access to all models. Every tier works across multiple IDEs, GitHub.com, GitHub Mobile and the Copilot CLI.
How to choose
At $10, Copilot Pro is the lowest-risk purchase, especially if your work already lives in GitHub — the credit allowance is transparent and you do not have to change editors. Cursor at $20 suits developers who want the tightest editor integration and will adopt a VS Code fork to get it. Devin Desktop at $20 fits teams who want the IDE to act as an agent-management console rather than a text editor, and its Pro tier bundles cloud agents that competitors hold back for higher plans.
Team math differs more than the headline numbers suggest. Cursor and Copilot charge purely per seat. Devin's $80 platform fee plus $40 per developer seat is worse for a two-person shop and better for a larger organization with many non-coding collaborators, since team membership itself is unlimited.
What is not settled
No independent 2026 benchmark compares completion accuracy across all three under identical conditions, so any claim that one "writes better code" is opinion rather than measurement. All three now meter agent usage instead of selling flat-rate access, which means your real monthly cost depends on how hard you run agents — published prices are floors, not ceilings. Cursor and Devin both sell overage at API pricing. Budget for that, and re-check the pricing pages before you commit: all three vendors changed their tiers at least once in the past year, and one of them changed its name.