Windsurf Reviews

My main use case for Windsurf is utilizing its standard feature, Cascade, which understands our repository structure very well and is genius in understanding and tracing dependencies across all the files we are using. It helps in modifying multiple files together, explains why something is broken, and how to fix bugs while also carrying context along long coding sessions. For instance, with JWT authentication in this FastAPI app, it updates the front login flow, inspects back-end routes, creates middleware, updates environment configs, modifies React components, and is useful in patching API calls across the projects.

In addition to my main use case with Windsurf, something unique I have noticed compared to other tools is how it can chain tasks together, such as analyze, plan, edit, test, and refactor, while maintaining intent memory across steps. This makes it feel closer to an AI teammate than a chatbot. It also respects naming conventions, existing abstractions, and follows our repository patterns to avoid random styling mutations. Compared to the previous Cursor, Windsurf behaves as an agentic workflow-focused engineering assistant.

The best features Windsurf offers, in my opinion, include ID galaxy, its understanding of the whole mission feature, Cascade, multi-file editing, repository-wide context awareness, terminal understanding, persistent workload memory, and step-by-step execution. All of these are very helpful in tracing how our project uses notifications, inspecting joins, following ETL lineage, comparing schemas, identifying merge conditions, detecting inconsistent primary keys, and suggesting refactors across multiple modules. Windsurf uniquely combines the functionality of AI coding tools that often resemble an IDE plus a chatbot into one continuous stream.

Persistent workload memory in Windsurf significantly helps my workflow by reducing the repetitive reteaching of folder structures, naming conventions, business rules, APIs, database patterns, and edge cases. It allows Windsurf to gradually learn about our repo structure, engineering patterns, ongoing tasks, and recent edits, making it a powerful tool in enterprise projects as it generates code faster and reduces cognitive reload time.

One small yet impactful feature of Windsurf that I want to highlight is how it handles large refactors, such as renaming domain projects, restructuring services, changing authentication flows, migrating SQL models, and converting Oracle SQL to Spark. Windsurf allows us to continue and finish series handling logic without re-explaining everything and makes debugging easier as it remembers previous errors, failed fixes, and environment issues.

Running the workflow with Windsurf has definitely saved our time, as it easily understands our prompts and logic, reducing engineering friction and saving time on repetitive tasks such as refactoring, debugging, documentation, test generation, and context switching. With its repo awareness and persistent context, it significantly compresses the rediscovery cycle, resulting in faster onboarding, quicker PR turnaround, and fewer delays.

We follow the Agile methodology, and we have observed that typical environment improvements using Windsurf are 30 to 60% faster, with a 20 to 40% reduction in debugging issue times and over 50% faster documentation test integrations. We have also experienced saving days or weeks for new developer onboarding, and we save approximately 5 to 10 engineering hours per developer per week.

In terms of improvement, I believe Windsurf could enhance features for generating PPTs and documentation to be clearer and more understandable, including visuals.

I have been using Windsurf for almost six months.

Windsurf has positively impacted my organization by running our workflow more efficiently.

My advice to teams evaluating Windsurf is to expect magic but to avoid over-trusting its outputs initially, as it is only for tiny code suggestions. However, teams can benefit significantly from workflow acceleration, repo navigations, debugging, and refactoring, particularly in high-friction areas such as legacy refactoring, ETL transformations, API scaffolding, documentation, and test creation.

I rate this product an 8 out of 10.

My main use case for Windsurf is for development and writing boilerplate code. I have been writing code to integrate third-party APIs. I mainly use it for development purposes.

Windsurf's best feature is that it is agentic. It automatically changes the code and updates it. If there are any exceptions, it automatically finds out what the exact issue is and provides the solution and fixes it.

Windsurf has saved me time and improved my code quality. We had some errors where I saw the exceptions in the logs. I copied the logs and pasted them into Windsurf, so it found the issue, found the bug, and fixed it. Otherwise, I would have had to manually debug it and solve the issue.

Windsurf has saved us a lot of time and manpower. A task can be done by one person using Windsurf. For example, a task that would take a few days can be done in one day. If I had four tasks for a day, I could finish them using Windsurf in half a day.

Windsurf starts to hallucinate after some point, which is a memory problem and a general AI problem. For example, after some time, it will start forgetting what we were doing and it starts hallucinating and doing the same things.

The free version is very good. An improvement would be to have the agentic AI directly integrated into the computer or as an IDE-specific plugin, rather than being browser-based.

The answers from Windsurf are not always accurate, and it is also a bit slow. Comparing it to other solutions like GitHub Copilot and other competitors, they give better and more advanced responses.

I have been using Windsurf for the past four months.

Windsurf is about 80% stable. Sometimes, it hallucinates.

Customer support is good.

Negative

Previously, I used GitHub Copilot. It was not as user-friendly and not agentic like Windsurf; it was just giving solutions. However, they have now upgraded it, and it is similar to Windsurf.

Windsurf's pricing and setup cost are reasonable compared to other providers. The cost is almost the same as competitors, and I do not see much difference. However, if it were a bit less, it would be more useful for us to save money since we are a startup.

Windsurf is very helpful for day-to-day tasks and should be used freely as you wish. Windsurf could be a little bit faster. My overall rating for this review is 6.

I have been using Windsurf for quite a long time, approximately four to five months. In my prior company, Windsurf was used, and in my new company, we also implemented Windsurf. For my personal use, I was using Windsurf Personal. I have been a thorough user for three to four months completely.

For example, if you have any software development project or any product requirement for which you need to build a SaaS solution, app, or back-end services, and you need to generate the code and ship it off quickly, you can use the Windsurf agent and IDE to provide commands using natural language, in English, just as humans speak, to its own agent. It would generate, go through your existing codebase, make recommendations, modify the existing codebase, and enhance productivity.

Windsurf is used in a company-wide practice as a code editor or IDE. It functions as a productivity tool. If I am working on a project and need to build or ship out certain features super fast, I would use the AI agent in Windsurf to generate the code, make minor modifications or adjustments on it, iterate over it, and then quickly ship it off. That is how Windsurf makes the most value addition to the team.

Even if the team size is small, using a tool such as Windsurf gives you a productivity boost. It comes with the free model, which they call SWE-LITE, SWE-1. These models are free, which is a big advantage for smaller teams. You do not have to spend money on different models or provide API key accesses. It comes out of the shelf with the editor.

There are two angles where Windsurf is actually better than Cursor or other competitive tools. Firstly, its understanding of the codebase is much better. If you have an existing codebase and are using the Windsurf IDE to run its AI agents to go through the codebase, it can identify design patterns and exactly what it is trying to do. Secondly, the price point is a significant advantage as Windsurf is way cheaper and does not force you to use any LLM providers, such as OpenAI or Anthropic.

It is very effective. If I am opening a file and have scripts already written, when I move my mouse pointer or push a tab on the keyboard, it automatically suggests almost 10 lines of code ahead. It reads through and tries to predict the next steps I need to take. Apart from the basic data setter, it predicts additional functions that may be needed, providing boilerplate code already.

We mostly use Python. In the earlier organization, we used Python and Go, along with some shell scripts and YML configuration files. These are quite accurate and great. I would give it nine out of 10 for that.

What they can do further and venture into next is to provide a CLI environment, similar to the command-line interface environment that Cursor offers. It allows for running a cursor agent from the command line to make changes, review pull requests, or access certain other capabilities. These capabilities are currently not in Windsurf. Windsurf focuses on the productivity and the ID/editor part.

I would rather look for the inclusion of pull request reviews or a kind of a TRD or technical requirement general documentation generation, or system diagram generation directly from the codebase in Windsurf itself. These should be the next obvious features they launch for developers.

In our team, there are certain people who use Windsurf regularly and appreciate using it. However, it is not a collaborative tool where someone is going to use the same tool and interact in the same IDE. Everyone does their local development, pushes it to different Git branches, someone reviews the PR, and then merges the branch. It is very localized in that sense.

I have been using Windsurf for quite a long time, approximately four to five months.

I did not have to deal with any deployment issues. It is so good that it is DIY (do it yourself). You can directly go ahead and use an editor. You do not need much technical support for it.

It is quite reliable. I would rate it eight out of 10. It is highly reliable.

We are satisfied with the service. We do not need additional help.

Positive

When it comes to setup, it is very simple. It is just an editor. You visit the website, create your subscription, and download the ID or editor based on your system. For Mac, it is a DMG file, and for Windows, it is an EXE installer file. You click on it, and it gets installed on your system. It is that simple and not complicated.

I would rate it two out of 10 for cost. It is very cheap compared to other tools in the market because 80% of the time, we are happy with their free model capabilities. Only 20% of the time do we go for a more in-depth or meticulous analysis. During this time, we use the Anthropic Claude model or OpenAI GPT-4 to dig deeper. That accounts for only 20% of the time, meaning it is only 20% of the cost, leading to a non-significant bill per month. Thus, it is much cheaper.

Cursor was a competitor to Windsurf. They have similar capabilities, such as code completion and script generation. The main differing point is the price. Cursor has higher pricing and does not provide any model itself. It would automatically choose a model based on the LLM providers you have access to, leading to a higher price point. Cursor's capabilities are otherwise comparable to Windsurf. For instance, there was a scenario about the OpenAI SDK package. While Windsurf provided the latest stable version, Cursor was a month behind and has only recently updated. It is a competitive landscape where both tools are comparable and try to outdo each other.

It is quite good and much better than alternatives. In our team, there are certain people who use Windsurf regularly and they appreciate using it. However, it is not a collaboration tool where someone is going to use the same tool and virtually interact in the same IDE. Everyone does their local development and pushes it to different Git branches, then someone does the PR review and merges the branch. It is very localized in that sense. Overall rating: 8/10.

For any product development or proof of concept and minimum viable product development, I utilize Windsurf as my base IDE to create the projects, to establish version controlling mechanisms and tracking mechanisms, and to add extensions that I can use for building my whole product and for my ease of understanding the project as well.

I created one project named Kilt Kidney Health Care AI based assistant chatbot, and in this chatbot, I had to create three facets of the product. The first is report generation, which is an AI-assisted report in my regional language combined with English. This allowed me to create the whole AI aspect into the product where Windsurf provides me with the whole architecture based scenario in dark mode. Cascade itself gives an option of Sonnet model or Claude Sonnet model. This utilizes my whole power of what I want to build for kidney patients and for the doctor for whom I have taken this project. The second part was generating specific chatbot questions from the particular report, so FAQs could be asked as well. This second layer was orchestrated again inside Windsurf, and the third was to create their whole website. All of these things made Windsurf very useful and very smooth to integrate all of my views and my project architecture was perfectly balanced in what the backend, frontend, and DevOps architecture needs to be integrated. Everything was handled perfectly within my team and the version control mechanism was also perfect enough, behaving exactly as it should when relating different models integration with peer teams.

I have been utilizing Windsurf as my IDE for around one and a half years.

I am currently utilizing Cascade AI as well, which is integrated for users to integrate their code base and project structure folder to the AI agent, which can be a good option to integrate how the agentic mechanisms are evolving towards building the project structure in Windsurf.

Cascade is the best feature I have found currently within different models and their memory storage. I can also try to add voice conversation between the AI and the user, which gives the flexibility to convey my views instead of writing them out and wasting my time.

Whenever I have any kind of problem statement, bug fixing, or debugging that I want to do, I just ask Cascade to look at my particular file which includes all of my integration of code in different languages, whether it is front end or back end. I ask it to check out a bug, do the fix, or even if I want to look out for any terminal issues, I just paste the terminal issue and it will look out for the codes and try to rectify the solution. That is the best feature that Cascade is currently doing. With voice conversation, I can convey my thoughts of what I want to build or what I want to fix. If it is a hotfix, bugfix, or any kind of software development process that I want to integrate, Windsurf works effectively with it.

Another tool I have used is Antigravity. Antigravity is doing deep research with its own agentic based architecture. Currently I am not seeing Windsurf to have deep research capability for any of the products. Its web search capability is not as powerful as other tools are currently performing in the Cascade scenario. A third thing I want to look out for is that its coding capability is not as fast and high as Claude code works out with, and it does not have any kind of articulation of taking the whole output by linking your terminal with Cascade. Antigravity provides that feature. In Antigravity, I can just click on the at rate sign on the terminal that will approach your whole terminal towards your AI agent and I can check the responses of output, what needs to be fixed out, what issues came, or whatever problems need to be solved. If Windsurf can do all these things, it can be the best option as well, as it is very smooth and flexible compared to Antigravity, but these features are currently lacking.

Additional sub agentic mechanisms could be added if solutions could be integrated or if there is capability to work out with multi-agentic based mechanisms by chaining out the thoughts of process.

I have been using the solution for about one and a half years.

Windsurf is stable.

Windsurf has scalability capabilities.

Customer service has been very good.

I was using VS Code. At that moment, even with the growing power of VS Code, I was not utilizing good capability of Copilot itself there and the coding structure was not as perfect as what I checked out with Cascade's Claude Sonnet model and Opus model. So I jumped from that to Windsurf.

The setup was very good. All the features of pricing, setup, costing, and licensing were perfect. Better solutions can be tried for adding subscription features. If not, there is a support team available to work out with.

My team was able to implement Windsurf.

Money and time have both been saved because we were utilizing a lot of time for bug fixing and solving troubleshooting issues. That time has now been reduced and on that regard, employees' time has been reduced as well, which has saved a lot of money. A lot of time has also been saved.

Another tool that I have used is Antigravity. Antigravity is doing deep research with its own agentic based architecture. Currently I am not seeing Windsurf to have deep research capability for any of the products.

I would recommend others to utilize these features and I will try to compare it with other tools. Antigravity can jump out in more responses than Windsurf itself in some instances, but Windsurf works good enough normally for any project architecture.

My overall rating for Windsurf is eight out of ten.

My main use case for Windsurf is for developing my college Capstone project. When I needed an AI tool that would help me with software development and guide me through everything with history records, I used it.

A specific example of how I used Windsurf for one of my college projects is that I was developing my project in React and then PHP, using PHP for the back end and MySQL for the database. I was constructing the application at my level with another AI tool like ChatGPT. I got stuck in between that. No other AI tool preserved the history completely and none worked properly or smoothly. When I gave two commands, they did not understand properly what I wanted to do. After getting stuck, I discovered Windsurf. Windsurf is an AI-powered IDE tool similar to VS Code. It is a replacement for VS Code, that kind of text editor. It works like VS Code but the AI is built in and does not help with just one word or one line. It will provide completely full code. So I can manage the project. I did not have to specify every detail each time I wanted something. I told them what kind of code I wanted and it understood, then generated that type of code. It can read multiple lines. I also use it so that if my code is in VS Code, then I can directly import or export from there.

Windsurf offers two best features: chat and text. We can chat through that component and write in different modes. It automatically generates code when we are chatting and explaining what we want in our project. First, it will understand and then the write mode type will think automatically. It will also ask us what features to add. It will redirect to the project directly if we allow access.

Windsurf has positively impacted my work, even as a student, as it is a time saver. It is best for saving time. If we do not know the full stack and only know about the front end, back end, or database, we can just give it the back end database and it will automatically handle the front end. Nobody knows everything, so it is a complete mentor. It is the best for beginners who do not know anything and want to build applications or projects, mapping their architecture and helping with both sides, as I mentioned, front and back end. It is super complete and fast. It also helps with error solving and HTML auto-learning.

I wish Windsurf would improve the free trial, as it is slow. As a student, I do not purchase much at a beginner level. Windsurf could improve by providing some features for beginners, such as two or three messages per day. Otherwise, it is perfect.

I have been working in my current field for almost two and a half months, as I am doing an internship.

Windsurf is stable for my project, and I have not encountered any crashes or reliability issues.

Windsurf's scalability is good, as it can handle larger projects or more users if needed. For my project, at least 10 to 15 users can use it, and it will create that kind of application.

I have not reached out to customer support, but I think it is the best because their features are the best, so customer support is also best.

Positive

I previously used mostly ChatGPT before Windsurf. I did not know some kind of solution at each level. Windsurf is a proper full-stack development tool. Whenever we do not know the proper thing, we can go in deep. Sometimes it does not give the proper answer, and we do not get what we want. Other tools do not understand sometimes. Windsurf is the best.

For my projects, I use Windsurf on my personal computer.

I have seen a return on investment using Windsurf, as it saves time. It absolutely creates value. As a student, for personal use, it occasionally costs something. We cannot purchase this kind of solution as students. However, as an organization, they can purchase it because it saves employee's energy and allows for more features because it will save time.

I did not have to give any money for it, so it is fully free, which is the best. I did not incur setup costs.

Before choosing Windsurf, I did not evaluate other options. I searched for other alternatives, but the first option was Windsurf, and I had the best experience, so I did not go through any other options.

My advice to others looking into using Windsurf is that if you are a beginner or a developer and want to save time, correct errors, or add features, it is perfectly great. You just have to use Windsurf and explore this product because it is excellent.

My company knows about the kind of features we want. We just give them a screenshot, and it will provide a fully complete full-stack development project. This kind of feature they have provided is perfect.

Windsurf is a fully magical platform where we can generate our fully complete full-stack application. We can create a basic dashboard with a sidebar, status page, and setting page using React or any other application. It will have multiple files created at once, with side-by-side effects, explaining what we have to review, accept, or reject individual changes. We also have undo-redo type of projects. It finalizes and auto-fixes errors and code. It is also affordable compared to any other products. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

My main use case for Windsurf was to create a website for the company.

A specific example of how I used Windsurf to create the website is that we needed a simple landing page for the new company, which included just a few sections, a hero section, a few feature sections, and a form for contact.

This is the only project I used it for, and it was a test. We were trying to test AI tools to speed up our work since it was a small startup.

The best features Windsurf offers, from my experience back in early 2025, include being a prompt-based, LLM style app and website builder. I mostly used the prompt to create the website even though I can develop and program, as we were testing to see if we could create the website faster.

Windsurf positively impacted my organization during the testing phase as it was the first tool that we used, which was good to compare with other tools.

Comparing Windsurf to other tools helped shape our expectations because it was the first tool that we used, so we had nothing to compare to.

When I started using Windsurf, I had a worse experience compared to building using code, as I am very fast at building code and it gave me tons of errors that I needed to fix. So it was basically faster to code all over again than to use the prompt-based approach. I used it for a few days, and then we dropped it and used Lovable instead.

The interface of Windsurf was quite easy to use, so I do not have a problem with the UI. However, the issue was that it gave me so many errors that took too long to fix, and it was hard to polish it because I spent so much time fixing the errors related to building what I wanted and also publishing.

If you ever bring back the prompt-based builder for Windsurf, then just make sure there are fewer errors coming up, as the experience was not bad; it just took too long to fix the errors. That is what I would improve.

I have been using Windsurf for about a year.

I would say Windsurf was 90% stable.

I do not know about Windsurf's scalability because we would not need more websites, but if you are building websites for clients, then I think if it did not have so many errors, we could scale. We would probably need to get a new plan, but I feel it could be scalable.

I did not previously use a different solution.

I did say it saved us about 10 hours of design time because, even though we did not continue with it, it helped us pin down and filter some of the things that we needed to decide on for the website.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that we used the free license back then.

Before choosing Windsurf, we evaluated both Lovable and Windsurf.

I just joined Windsurf again because I used it a year ago for a few days and never used it again, but when I joined now to see what changes it had, I noticed that it seems like a completely different tool that is much more robust with a different goal now. I see a lot of potential and would try to use it again for its new purpose.

My advice to others looking into using Windsurf is that if you are looking for the tool that it was a year ago, it is just gone. It is a different tool now, but if your needs are more technical, involving code, then I would definitely check it out.

I am rating this review 5.

I have been using Windsurf for the last six to seven months, and I am now working on the automation part of that as well, such as integrating Playwright and MCVS. I am integrating AI into Windsurf as well.

My main use case for Windsurf is especially for QA automation tasks. Windsurf helps with QA automation by enabling me to create test cases automatically because manually we cannot create any test cases, nor can we get into the user stories due to running upon the test creations and creating a new design ops. A lot of things which have to be done manually are now a hectic task. With the help of Playwright and MCVS, I integrate all the tickets, and I get the data populated, and all the QAT, UAT sign-off can also be done in an automatic way.

I can give you a quick specific example. On a daily basis, if I come through any new setup, I will for sure update my use case.

The best features Windsurf offers are the user interface as well as the zero latency.

Regarding the user interface, it is pretty good and easy to interact with, allowing any layman to get into Windsurf and easily go through the next steps. Coming to the latency part, it is zero latency, and I have never seen any lag happening to date.

Windsurf has impacted my organization positively in that previously, we used to do manual automation, performing around close to ten user stories, or at most eight user stories per sprint. But now, with this Windsurf and Playwright combination, I am probably handling close to thirty, forty, or even thirty-six user stories for release for every sprint.

Being able to handle thirty to thirty-six user stories per sprint, compared to eight before, has greatly impacted my team's productivity because the work culture and work structure have not changed. The only difference is that developers are now doing their work easily with this as well. People who are very new or not sure about the exact features of Windsurf will still manage eight to ten user stories in a sprint. However, those who are pretty aware of how to integrate the other features and use Windsurf can develop more.

I do not want to comment on anything as of now in terms of how Windsurf can be improved, but I will surely raise feedback if I figure out any aspects that may help in the global field.

You could please add a couple of other MCVSs, or else you can integrate some sort of new LLMs coming up as a wishlist item for the future regarding needed improvements.

I am working in my current field for more than close to ten years.

Windsurf is stable.

For scalability, Windsurf has a couple of options, and I will raise feedback whenever I feel there is some scope to improve, and that will go into the scalability pattern only.

I have not had any interaction with customer support yet as the situation has not come up, but I hope it does not come.

Previously, I used manual work as a different solution, and there was no AI integration, and people were not good enough at integrating those. But I am very good at integrating AI, so that is how I got Windsurf.

I have seen a return on investment regarding productivity; the business team will be looking into money and everything. But in terms of productivity, I have demonstrated that moving from eight story points per sprint to thirty to thirty-six story points per sprint is the good metric I have seen.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that everything is taken care of by the company, so I am not bothered or involved in this.

Before choosing Windsurf, I did not evaluate other options because I was using Windsurf for a long time in another organization also, and here, the only thing I did is integration, specifically AI integration.

My advice to others looking into using Windsurf is that going on a legacy model does not make any sense; you have to be smart in integrating the things that are already available on Windsurf. Explore Windsurf, do a deep dive into Windsurf's feasibilities, features, and everything, and that is where you can make much more of Windsurf.

I have no additional thoughts about Windsurf; it is pretty good and going good. The only thing is to keep on going and keep on doing the improvements as per the generation. I would rate this review a nine out of ten.

My main use case for Windsurf is software development. A quick specific example of what I mainly use Windsurf for is developing whatever needs to be built.

Windsurf offers several valuable features, including the browser, which I really appreciate, but the best feature is integration. The browser feature is valuable for me because it helps me program in development and gain an understanding of the code. Windsurf has positively impacted my organization because we accomplish more with fewer people. Since using Windsurf, I notice more errors, but we deliver approximately twice as fast.

Windsurf can be improved by bringing back the browser integration. When new models come out, there needs to be a better way to find them instead of going to the release notes; the model picker should highlight the newer beta or free models more prominently.

I have been using Windsurf for just about a year.

Windsurf is stable most of the time.

Windsurf's scalability is maintained very well; I think it is more a function of the models than Windsurf itself. I have used it for a fairly large project, and it scales fine.

The customer support for Windsurf is good, as the release notes are really helpful.

Negative

Windsurf was the first solution I used.

I have seen a return on investment with Windsurf because I have saved time and money and needed fewer resources since using it. My clients save time and money, and we are generally about twice as fast with AI-enabled software development.

My experience with Windsurf's pricing, setup cost, and licensing was positive. I received a discount because I joined early, so the license cost or monthly rental of Windsurf has been reasonably priced.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Windsurf; it was the first one I looked at, and I was satisfied with it.

Windsurf can be improved by bringing back the browser integration. When new models come out, there needs to be a better way to find them instead of going to the release notes; the model picker should highlight the newer beta or free models more prominently. My advice for others looking into using Windsurf is to stick with it for about three months; it will take approximately three months to reach a point where you are faster with it. I would rate Windsurf a nine out of ten, as what would make it a ten for me is if the newer models last longer when they come out.