I constantly evaluate both because I need to stay on top of dev tooling for my job.

Cursor always felt like a chat interface jammed into an IDE that was getting in my way. Copy-pasting from the web interfaces of chatgpt, gemini, claude, etc. was equally, if not more, effective than trying to use cursor for me.

Windsurf however did boost my productivity beyond what those web interfaces would do. It seemed much better at working on the command line, actually doing all the stuff around software that wasn't just writing the code.

Personally I haven't rolled it out to my teams because of their pricing model but I do think it's worth using (just not with the way they're pricing it).

we have standardized on windsurf in my company. Cursor was part of the review but Windsurf has better support for dev containers and development on WSL, which most of our developers use. So beyond the actual AI part, there are some surprisingly rough edges with Cursor (using it with WSL is super hacky)

i’ve used both a bit. cursor has more features and feels more polished, but windsurf is faster and cheaper. windsurf also has a cleaner UI. if you don’t need all the extra stuff in cursor, windsurf’s a pretty solid option.