Devin vs Windsurf (now Devin Desktop)

Devin and Windsurf are not two vendors competing for the same job — they are sibling products built by the same company. Cognition launched Devin in 2025 as a cloud-based autonomous coding agent, then acquired what was left of Windsurf (formerly Codeium) and, in June 2026, folded it into the Devin family by rebranding it Devin Desktop. Confirmed on Cognition's own site: "Devin Desktop is the new name for Windsurf... we're building on the IDE foundation of Windsurf to introduce the command center for managing all your agents in one place" — existing Windsurf accounts, plans, extensions and settings carried over automatically, so a search for "Devin vs Windsurf" is really a question about which job each one does, and whether you need one or both, not which company to trust.

The two solve different problems. Devin is a cloud async agent: hand it a whole ticket — a bug, a migration, a scoped feature — and it works unattended on its own VM with a real shell and browser, then opens a pull request for a human to review; you can run a fleet of Devins on independent tickets in parallel, and it ships a public API plus Slack/Linear triggers for scripting into CI and incident response, alongside a documented CLI (Devin for Terminal) that acts as an MCP client, wiring external tool servers — GitHub, Linear, Jira and others — directly into its workflow. Windsurf, now Devin Desktop, is the opposite interaction model: an installed, VS Code-style IDE where you code interactively while an agent reads across the whole repository and proposes diffs alongside you. Since the rebrand it opens onto an "Agent Command Center" — a Kanban board for launching and steering multiple local and cloud agents from one window — and its original Cascade agent was retired on 1 July 2026 in favor of a new from-scratch agent, Devin Local. Its most distinctive feature has nothing to do with Cognition's own models: the open Agent Client Protocol (ACP) lets third-party agents — confirmed live on devin.ai/desktop as Claude Agent, Codex and OpenCode — run natively inside the editor instead of being locked to one vendor (Gemini CLI was ACP-compatible too, until Google restricted free access to it in June 2026; its Antigravity CLI replacement doesn't support ACP yet).

Pricing removes the usual "budget vs premium" trade-off: Devin and Devin Desktop share one subscription and one quota, re-confirmed live on both products' own pricing pages on 2026-08-02. Free covers a light usage allowance on either surface; Pro is $20/month for full frontier-model access (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) plus Cognition's own SWE-1.7 model at no extra cost; Max is $200/month for a much larger quota; Teams is $80/month base plus $40/seat with centralized billing and admin controls; Enterprise is custom, billed in Agent Compute Units, with SSO and a dedicated deployment option. Because it's one plan across both surfaces, using Devin's cloud agent for delegated tickets and Devin Desktop for interactive pairing isn't two separate purchases — it's one subscription used two ways, which is the real argument for treating this as an "and" decision rather than an "or" one.