This is the ONLY review I've seen where the person truly goes in-depth instead of the usual theres-a-million-ides-and-the-new-shiny-one-beats-all. Had I seen this last week I would've saved myself leaving Cursor too quickly and having Windsurf mess up a week's worth of code. Cursor IS more reliable and better. And that's not even counting the new agentic feature
I think this is a fair review from an experienced developer. For me as a non programmer windsurf pulls way ahead simply because I was able to make my first app and have zero programming knowledge or even how to use VS code interface. I tried cursor and while the interface was the same the experience was not. I think a fair way to describe the experience is Cursor is like driving a manual transmission while Windsurf is automatic, with fully autonomous driving as the holy grail we should strive for.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience from this different perspective! You're right - as an experienced dev, it can be hard for me to fully imagine being a total beginner. Which is why the video I did with my wife was so funny to me - it did not go as I expected, and we ended up sifting through a ton of basics but apparently it was really helpful to a lot of other beginners! Good analogy btw - and totally agree about the ultimate goal of full automation.
Thanks for this. So many so-called “Cursor Killers” out there, but nothing comes close. Great to find an honest UA-camr who knows his stuff. I tried running on the API key for a day. I burned through $45 in 6 hours. So Cursors $20 a month is a bargain. It it saved only 30 minutes a month compared to VSCode, it’s worth it.
Thank you so much for doing those type of videos, I’ve been watching many of your videos and you’ve been a very valuable source of information! Looking forward to seeing the next review :)
Thanks for comparing in details, really useful. I noticed that Windsurf is buggy in Windows but works perfectly in MacOS, I have no idea why but i hope some1 can confirm this
I suspect this is true! Most sillicon valley devs of these tools are using 100% Macs so I wonder if the testing is lacking for Windows. In fact, I was able to fix my undo/redo line removal issue by manually configuring Windsurf to use "LF" instead of "CRLF" as the default line separator. This wasn't an issue in Cursor, so I didn't expect to have to change it here. Now I'm wondering what other bugs I saw that may not be an issue on Mac..
Volo, you have done a fantastic and great job. Thanks for such content. Keep up the good work, your opinion and experience are very important and interesting.
and remember, this windsurf is like just 2weeks ages compared to cursor with 1,5 years ages based on release date. to be honest, i will stop on cursor to switch to windsurf, i had good enough experience using it. and i love the way just analyze my company project which using 2017 reactjs. yes its mixed class component and functional component, but you know cursor is stuggle to handle it, sometimes it lost to a bad decision but windsurf does well perform on it. im sure they will get better and better in term of feature, just need a little bit of time they will have the same and competitive feature compare to cursor. or might be even better ? lets wait =)) btw great video , im happy that someone take a time to do a deep comparison on it =)
Thank you! You're absolutely right - it's a brand new product, and honestly I was pleasantly surprised, especially by the agentic capabilities. The automatic file identification is great. I'm excited to review them again in the future as they fix bugs and iterate on some of the features!
@ I’ll give that a try, thanks! I tried Cursor: attempt update and it didn’t do anything. Kind of clunky that you have to download the full installer. I’m guessing the update process is in their roadmap.
@@VoloBuilds I went and grabbed the latest installer and I'm on version 0.43.3. I don't see anything mentioning the agent stuff. This upgrade process isn't that great. I went to the website to find some kind of Whats new section and don't see any documentation on the new functionality. Nothing in the forum either. They need to work on their documentation and the update process or I think Windsurf will end up eating their lunch.
Very good review. Worth noticing as well you can lose time with some of those tools by actually hiting your head on the wall sometimes instead of getting the job done “by hand”
Agreed. I’ve used Cursor extensively and Windsurf and feel Cline is the best and most autonomous. Definitely do a video comparison with that @VoloBuilds! I think you will like it
really great review, thank you!!. For a full-time developer, the 20-dollar plan of Cursor with a limit of 500 requests per month feels too restrictive. On the other hand, Windsurf is only 10 dollars per month with no request limit, making it far superior at the moment. (Of course, I understand this might not be a sustainable pricing model.) I think it would have been better if the video mentioned Windsurf's overwhelming advantage in terms of request limits at this point. I have a question: Does Cursor's 40-dollar plan allow for almost unlimited requests, or is there a limit of 1,000 requests?
Thank you! I did upgrade to $40/mo for Cursor but was rarely hitting the 500 requests/mo for whatever reason. Maybe I just use a lot of auto-complete and not too much context/small prompts? Not sure! But the 500 isn't an actual limit because you actually have unlimited requests - but they just get queued. Usually the queue is 10 seconds or less, so it's not terrible. Also, I don't think the Cursor requests are the same as the Windsurf requests - because they are 1000 "steps" and one request is likely to take multiple steps. There is no clarity regarding how much you've used and what happens when you hit 1000.
Volo, thanks for the review, really helps a lot. AI IDEs are evolving very fast. I got the impression that the possibility of using a local LLM such as Qwen 2.5 7B, 32B is somehow not discussed. Although it is very important for beginners. As far as I understand Cursor can connect to a local Ollama or LM Studio server via an API Gateway such as Ngrok. Can Windsurf use local LLM?
Glad it helped! Windsurf doesn't have configurable LLMs right now, so you can't run local models with it as far as I can tell. I have not focused on local LLMs since in my experience Sonnet 3.5 is unbeatable and the open solutions haven't come close to the code quality. I also don't fully understand the usecases for when it would be necessary. I'm curious, what are your thoughts about local models and what is the use case you are considering them for?
@@VoloBuilds It's simple, comparing different LLMs, setting up a local infrastructure. OpenSource LLM is Free, unlimited number of tokens. Perhaps privacy is important to some. Of course, after a beginner gets stable work you can switch to top proprietary LLMs such as Claude Sonet 3.5, GPT O1, 4o and so on.
@@AndrewBashtovoy Yeah my thinking is like - if you're coding and it saves you one hour per month, $10 or $20 is easily justified - and let's be real, these things save MUCH more time than that! Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
@@VoloBuilds I'll even say more, it not only saves time but also lowers the threshold of entry into the programming profession. We see a shift of focus from syntax to abstractions. Here would be a very interesting video comparing code quality of OpenSource LLM vs proprietary LLMs
I'm a Pro subscriber to Cursor. Would definitely try Windsurf but they lack WSL support which is a no-go. They also lack multimodal prompt capabilities. Cline: heard a lot of good things but it didn't produce a working program for me where cursor did. So I'll be with cursor for the moment.
Oh interesting! I didn't realize they are missing WSL support. But yeah they really need to add the image upload. Thanks for sharing your experience w/ Cline - I've had a lot of ppl suggest that one to me; will be checking it out soon.
I actually struggled more with Undo/Redo than anything in Windsurf. I do like the Accept All / Reject All, but keep in mind it only works if you don't make any additional changes afterwards. The undo/redo stack is linear so it can't possibly "pull out" changes it made after you made additional ones. Cursor also has accept all/reject all in the composer, but I tend not to use it. Will be giving it a more thorough try with v0.43 though.
I am leaving Cursor after months of heavy use, it suffers from a lot of hallucination which require a lot of careful prompt engineering. i am more impressed by the last bolt.new update and i am running it locally on a 4070ti for free.
@AbouAnia out of curiosity. I've asked a few people. Have you been able to fully create a react or next js page? Or do you still need to port it into cursor/windsurf and finish?
I had trouble getting bolt to create functional code and the chat disappears if you leave the conversation, so I had issues using it. I will probably go back to it to give it a more thorough evaluation. Any tips to achieve success with Bolt?
The only reason why I recommend using windsurf. It messes up less often. It doesn't insert stuff or create incorrect directories which break your program. Being new this was my issue. Windsurf has helped a lot with that.
Yeah Cursor has consistently been at the top of the stack for a while now and I'm really excited to try out their Agent solution - I wonder if they finally cracked it. Many other Agent-based solutions generally spin their wheels and make a lot of mistakes, which is why I was excited to see how well the Windsurf agents worked. Not perfect, but better than other agentic solutions so far.
Nocode builder, windsurf is easy to use esp with large projects, in cursor I seem to hit limit faster for free plan. Context+ file structure+codes+dependencies= you're done.
Interesting; I feel like I code pretty frequently but I am not really hitting these limits. I did upgrade to $40/mo though and I don't use docs too frequently so perhaps it's the way I use it. The windsurf 1000 steps thing needs clarification; I have no idea how quickly it is reached or what happens when you reach it
The reason I still prefer Cursor is that I can screenshot and paste an image into chat/composer to quickly inform Claude what I want. I couldn't simply paste an image into Windsurf.
I've been using paid windsurf and cancelled my cursor subscription. I use the image I put often and it's definitely useful. But I prefer windsurf still. So I swap for a quick input result and go back.
@javier01 same here. It's interesting that they don't have a .cursorrules equivalent or an image function. But I'd assume this will be fixed soon enough. Cursor taught me a lot already. No hate. But ws just seems more consistent for sure.
Yes - from a practical perspective, this is a significant feature that definitely sets Cursor apart. Windsurf dev team did say they are working on it, so hopefully we'll see it soon!
I don't know about images, but in response to 2:43 you can give it documentation for context. I create a masterplan.md file, then create an instructions folder + instructions md file, then drag in my masterplan doc and tell Cascade to load it into instructions.md. From then on Cascade knows to reference the codebase _and_ the instructions.
I was referring to Documentation which Cursor has out of the box (docs for various standard libraries/frameworks). Windsurf doesn't currently have that - but you are right that there is a workaround to achieve a similar effect by adding the file to your repository and then referencing it - either through directly tagging, or having an index sort of file that tells it what it should reference. I believe this is still more friction than what Cursor enables, but thank you for sharing the workaround!
@VoloBuilds GPT Pilot (Pythagora) is better.. Since last year it has already been integrated with most of the features mentioned in this video, in addition to being the pioneer in being 100% multi-agent based. You should seriously give it a chance.
Many of the features are shared yeah, but Windsurf did have the edge on the Autonomy front. Now Cursor released Agents so I have my hands full working on the next video :)
@@VoloBuilds I just downloaded it myself a little ago so haven't tried it yet but I noticed it wasnt an option in chat and its not anywhere in the settings anymore.
This is the ONLY review I've seen where the person truly goes in-depth instead of the usual theres-a-million-ides-and-the-new-shiny-one-beats-all. Had I seen this last week I would've saved myself leaving Cursor too quickly and having Windsurf mess up a week's worth of code. Cursor IS more reliable and better. And that's not even counting the new agentic feature
Thank you very much! Glad it was helpful and I'm excited to try out the new Cursor Agents and share my thoughts
@VoloBuilds looking forward to the video too
I think this is a fair review from an experienced developer. For me as a non programmer windsurf pulls way ahead simply because I was able to make my first app and have zero programming knowledge or even how to use VS code interface. I tried cursor and while the interface was the same the experience was not. I think a fair way to describe the experience is Cursor is like driving a manual transmission while Windsurf is automatic, with fully autonomous driving as the holy grail we should strive for.
Good analogy. I'm too a beginner. Will try out Windsurf. Thanks
Thank you so much for sharing your experience from this different perspective! You're right - as an experienced dev, it can be hard for me to fully imagine being a total beginner. Which is why the video I did with my wife was so funny to me - it did not go as I expected, and we ended up sifting through a ton of basics but apparently it was really helpful to a lot of other beginners! Good analogy btw - and totally agree about the ultimate goal of full automation.
Thanks for this. So many so-called “Cursor Killers” out there, but nothing comes close. Great to find an honest UA-camr who knows his stuff. I tried running on the API key for a day. I burned through $45 in 6 hours. So Cursors $20 a month is a bargain. It it saved only 30 minutes a month compared to VSCode, it’s worth it.
Hey Volo! Such a great comparison video! Thanks for all the info, I really value your opinion! Jason
Thanks Jay! Appreciate your support :)
Thank you so much for doing those type of videos, I’ve been watching many of your videos and you’ve been a very valuable source of information! Looking forward to seeing the next review :)
Thank you very much! I'm gonna be taking a look at the Cursor Agents next; really curious to see how they compare to the Windsurf agentic capabilities
@@VoloBuilds I can't wait to see what you find!
That was an excellent comparison, thank you for this video, I got really good value out of it!
You're very welcome! Thanks for watching
Thanks for comparing in details, really useful. I noticed that Windsurf is buggy in Windows but works perfectly in MacOS, I have no idea why but i hope some1 can confirm this
I suspect this is true! Most sillicon valley devs of these tools are using 100% Macs so I wonder if the testing is lacking for Windows. In fact, I was able to fix my undo/redo line removal issue by manually configuring Windsurf to use "LF" instead of "CRLF" as the default line separator. This wasn't an issue in Cursor, so I didn't expect to have to change it here. Now I'm wondering what other bugs I saw that may not be an issue on Mac..
Volo, you have done a fantastic and great job. Thanks for such content. Keep up the good work, your opinion and experience are very important and interesting.
Thank you, Serhii! Appreciate your support :)
and remember, this windsurf is like just 2weeks ages compared to cursor with 1,5 years ages based on release date. to be honest, i will stop on cursor to switch to windsurf, i had good enough experience using it. and i love the way just analyze my company project which using 2017 reactjs. yes its mixed class component and functional component, but you know cursor is stuggle to handle it, sometimes it lost to a bad decision but windsurf does well perform on it.
im sure they will get better and better in term of feature, just need a little bit of time they will have the same and competitive feature compare to cursor. or might be even better ? lets wait =))
btw great video , im happy that someone take a time to do a deep comparison on it =)
Thank you! You're absolutely right - it's a brand new product, and honestly I was pleasantly surprised, especially by the agentic capabilities. The automatic file identification is great. I'm excited to review them again in the future as they fix bugs and iterate on some of the features!
I started using Windsurf over the weekend. Amazing stuff using the free one. Pro is 10 bucks cheaper than Cursor so I might make the switch.
Yeah it's an impressive product. I'm curious to see how the new Cursor Agents stack up.
Me too but it hasn’t rolled to me yet. Curious to see if Azure integration works after the update. That would be a big one for me.
I found you can download the new version if you go to the website directly and re-download it as if you don't have it yet!
@ I’ll give that a try, thanks! I tried Cursor: attempt update and it didn’t do anything. Kind of clunky that you have to download the full installer. I’m guessing the update process is in their roadmap.
@@VoloBuilds I went and grabbed the latest installer and I'm on version 0.43.3. I don't see anything mentioning the agent stuff. This upgrade process isn't that great. I went to the website to find some kind of Whats new section and don't see any documentation on the new functionality. Nothing in the forum either. They need to work on their documentation and the update process or I think Windsurf will end up eating their lunch.
Very good review. Worth noticing as well you can lose time with some of those tools by actually hiting your head on the wall sometimes instead of getting the job done “by hand”
Great review . Your experience is similar to mine
Would love to see you score Cline (plugin for VSCode)
Thanks for the suggestion!
Agreed. I’ve used Cursor extensively and Windsurf and feel Cline is the best and most autonomous. Definitely do a video comparison with that @VoloBuilds! I think you will like it
really great review, thank you!!. For a full-time developer, the 20-dollar plan of Cursor with a limit of 500 requests per month feels too restrictive. On the other hand, Windsurf is only 10 dollars per month with no request limit, making it far superior at the moment. (Of course, I understand this might not be a sustainable pricing model.) I think it would have been better if the video mentioned Windsurf's overwhelming advantage in terms of request limits at this point. I have a question: Does Cursor's 40-dollar plan allow for almost unlimited requests, or is there a limit of 1,000 requests?
Thank you! I did upgrade to $40/mo for Cursor but was rarely hitting the 500 requests/mo for whatever reason. Maybe I just use a lot of auto-complete and not too much context/small prompts? Not sure! But the 500 isn't an actual limit because you actually have unlimited requests - but they just get queued. Usually the queue is 10 seconds or less, so it's not terrible.
Also, I don't think the Cursor requests are the same as the Windsurf requests - because they are 1000 "steps" and one request is likely to take multiple steps. There is no clarity regarding how much you've used and what happens when you hit 1000.
Volo, thanks for the review, really helps a lot. AI IDEs are evolving very fast. I got the impression that the possibility of using a local LLM such as Qwen 2.5 7B, 32B is somehow not discussed. Although it is very important for beginners. As far as I understand Cursor can connect to a local Ollama or LM Studio server via an API Gateway such as Ngrok. Can Windsurf use local LLM?
Glad it helped! Windsurf doesn't have configurable LLMs right now, so you can't run local models with it as far as I can tell. I have not focused on local LLMs since in my experience Sonnet 3.5 is unbeatable and the open solutions haven't come close to the code quality. I also don't fully understand the usecases for when it would be necessary. I'm curious, what are your thoughts about local models and what is the use case you are considering them for?
@@VoloBuilds It's simple, comparing different LLMs, setting up a local infrastructure. OpenSource LLM is Free, unlimited number of tokens. Perhaps privacy is important to some. Of course, after a beginner gets stable work you can switch to top proprietary LLMs such as Claude Sonet 3.5, GPT O1, 4o and so on.
@@AndrewBashtovoy Yeah my thinking is like - if you're coding and it saves you one hour per month, $10 or $20 is easily justified - and let's be real, these things save MUCH more time than that! Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
@@VoloBuilds I'll even say more, it not only saves time but also lowers the threshold of entry into the programming profession. We see a shift of focus from syntax to abstractions. Here would be a very interesting video comparing code quality of OpenSource LLM vs proprietary LLMs
I'm a Pro subscriber to Cursor. Would definitely try Windsurf but they lack WSL support which is a no-go. They also lack multimodal prompt capabilities.
Cline: heard a lot of good things but it didn't produce a working program for me where cursor did. So I'll be with cursor for the moment.
Oh interesting! I didn't realize they are missing WSL support. But yeah they really need to add the image upload. Thanks for sharing your experience w/ Cline - I've had a lot of ppl suggest that one to me; will be checking it out soon.
the reason to prefer windsurf over cursor is, that you can jump back into any stage of the code by undoing a chat you"ve sent to the AI
I actually struggled more with Undo/Redo than anything in Windsurf. I do like the Accept All / Reject All, but keep in mind it only works if you don't make any additional changes afterwards. The undo/redo stack is linear so it can't possibly "pull out" changes it made after you made additional ones. Cursor also has accept all/reject all in the composer, but I tend not to use it. Will be giving it a more thorough try with v0.43 though.
Cursor has this as well
I am leaving Cursor after months of heavy use, it suffers from a lot of hallucination which require a lot of careful prompt engineering. i am more impressed by the last bolt.new update and i am running it locally on a 4070ti for free.
I ran into bolt getting error loops and not resolving. Were you able to make something fully functional or just a template?
@ bolt is way better
@AbouAnia out of curiosity. I've asked a few people. Have you been able to fully create a react or next js page? Or do you still need to port it into cursor/windsurf and finish?
@@chriscotton4207 do you mean using bolt? well i guess using VS code after
I had trouble getting bolt to create functional code and the chat disappears if you leave the conversation, so I had issues using it. I will probably go back to it to give it a more thorough evaluation. Any tips to achieve success with Bolt?
2160p 4k looks good!
So far I use Cursor I am a beginner and I do not want to change softwer so offten. I used agents in Replit and I had bad experience.
The only reason why I recommend using windsurf. It messes up less often. It doesn't insert stuff or create incorrect directories which break your program. Being new this was my issue. Windsurf has helped a lot with that.
Yeah Cursor has consistently been at the top of the stack for a while now and I'm really excited to try out their Agent solution - I wonder if they finally cracked it. Many other Agent-based solutions generally spin their wheels and make a lot of mistakes, which is why I was excited to see how well the Windsurf agents worked. Not perfect, but better than other agentic solutions so far.
I found out that you have to be very specific znd the cascade will do wonders for you
Nocode builder, windsurf is easy to use esp with large projects, in cursor I seem to hit limit faster for free plan.
Context+ file structure+codes+dependencies= you're done.
Interesting; I feel like I code pretty frequently but I am not really hitting these limits. I did upgrade to $40/mo though and I don't use docs too frequently so perhaps it's the way I use it. The windsurf 1000 steps thing needs clarification; I have no idea how quickly it is reached or what happens when you reach it
The reason I still prefer Cursor is that I can screenshot and paste an image into chat/composer to quickly inform Claude what I want. I couldn't simply paste an image into Windsurf.
I've been using paid windsurf and cancelled my cursor subscription. I use the image I put often and it's definitely useful. But I prefer windsurf still.
So I swap for a quick input result and go back.
@@chriscotton4207same here! WS will do the photo upload soon though I hope.
If it is not frequent usage then you can use free claude website for it
@javier01 same here. It's interesting that they don't have a .cursorrules equivalent or an image function. But I'd assume this will be fixed soon enough. Cursor taught me a lot already. No hate. But ws just seems more consistent for sure.
Yes - from a practical perspective, this is a significant feature that definitely sets Cursor apart. Windsurf dev team did say they are working on it, so hopefully we'll see it soon!
Have you done a comparison with Cline?
Not yet, but I have been hearing some good things so will add it to my list to review
as a beginner ,who can tell me choose which one
You most certainly *_CAN_* load documents into Windsurf.
@@mybocks3 I'm not by my computer right now but can you load an image and have it read it.
I don't know about images, but in response to 2:43 you can give it documentation for context. I create a masterplan.md file, then create an instructions folder + instructions md file, then drag in my masterplan doc and tell Cascade to load it into instructions.md. From then on Cascade knows to reference the codebase _and_ the instructions.
I was referring to Documentation which Cursor has out of the box (docs for various standard libraries/frameworks). Windsurf doesn't currently have that - but you are right that there is a workaround to achieve a similar effect by adding the file to your repository and then referencing it - either through directly tagging, or having an index sort of file that tells it what it should reference. I believe this is still more friction than what Cursor enables, but thank you for sharing the workaround!
Thanks
@VoloBuilds GPT Pilot (Pythagora) is better.. Since last year it has already been integrated with most of the features mentioned in this video, in addition to being the pioneer in being 100% multi-agent based. You should seriously give it a chance.
Thanks for the suggestion, will check it out!
Windsurf a like so much cuz the app read all my folders in the project
Yeah the automatic file identification is pretty great; I saw that Cursor also just added it in v0.43 - I'm curious if it's as good
What cursor have already 9 months
Many of the features are shared yeah, but Windsurf did have the edge on the Autonomy front. Now Cursor released Agents so I have my hands full working on the next video :)
The new cursor release is wonky.
The new cursor update removed long context chats.
What. Are you serious? I haven't tried it yet, but about to dig in. What is the limitation you are seeing?
@@VoloBuilds I just downloaded it myself a little ago so haven't tried it yet but I noticed it wasnt an option in chat and its not anywhere in the settings anymore.
@@FactsNoCare Thanks for the heads up - I'll have to try and see!
Windsurf, for now
It's definitely a solid option. I'm curious to see how the v0.43 Cursor agents stack up to Windsurf
New update cursor sucks a lott also the @codebase is gone
Oh no :( About to try it out now, we'll see how it goes. The changelog looked really impressive but I've seen mixed reviews
Cursor is useless!
You forget to mention that cursor is 20$, windsurf 10$
There's literally a whole section in the video called Value during which I talk about the price.
Watch the video, the last section is about the price.