GitHub vs Windsurf.dev
GitHub uniquely has 3 features · Windsurf.dev uniquely has 1 feature.
| GitHub | Windsurf.dev | |
|---|---|---|
| Company | ||
| Founded | 2021 | 2022 |
| HQ | San Francisco, USA | Mountain View, CA, USA |
| AI model | GPT-4o, Claude Haiku 4.5, and others (multi-model) | Cascade (proprietary, powered by Claude/GPT-4 class models) |
| User base | 1M+ (GitHub reports 1M+ Copilot subscribers) | 500K+ |
| Platforms | Web, VS Code, Visual Studio, Xcode, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, Azure Data Studio, Eclipse, Raycast | Web, Windows, macOS, Linux (Windsurf IDE desktop app) |
| Languages | English (interface); 25+ programming languages supported | 25+ |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | Yes — up to 2,000 completions/month on free tier | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes — 30-day free trial for GitHub Enterprise including Copilot | — |
| Starting price | Free (GitHub Copilot Free tier with 2,000 completions/month) | Free |
| Enterprise | Starting at $21/user/month (Enterprise plan) | Custom |
| All plans | Pro$10/moPro+$39/moMax$100/mo | FreeFreePro$20/moMax$200/moTeams$60/mo per userEnterpriseCustom |
| Positioning | ||
| Best for | Individual developers, teams, and enterprises seeking AI-powered code generation and assistance inside their existing IDEs | Developers seeking AI-powered full-stack code generation, refactoring, and workflow automation within an intelligent IDE |
| Differentiator | Natively integrated into the world's largest code repository platform (GitHub), offering AI assistance across the full dev lifecycle — from code completion to security scanning — with multi-model support including GPT-4o and Claude. | Windsurf features Cascade, an agentic AI engine with deep multi-file context awareness that can autonomously plan and execute complex coding tasks across an entire codebase rather than just completing single lines or snippets. |
| Competitors | Cursor, Tabnine, Amazon CodeWhisperer, Codeium, JetBrains AI Assistant | GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codeium, Tabnine, Amazon Q Developer |
| Features | ||
| Cli Support | ✓ | ✓ |
| Code Completion | ✓ | ✓ |
| Code Generation | ✓ | ✓ |
| Code Review | ✓ | ✓ |
| Codebase Indexing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Debugging | ✓ | ✓ |
| Git Integration | ✓ | ✓ |
| IDE Plugins | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi Language Support | ✓ | ✓ |
| Refactoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| Security Scanning | ✓ | — |
| Self Hosted Option | ✓ | ✓ |
| Team Features | ✓ | ✓ |
| Test Generation | ✓ | ✓ |
| Integrations | ||
| API Access | ✓ | — |
| Github Integration | ✓ | ✓ |
| Gitlab Integration | ✕ | ✓ |
| Jetbrains Plugin | ✓ | — |
| Key Integrations | VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode, Neovim, Azure Data Studio, Eclipse, Raycast, GitHub Actions, Dependabot, GitHub Models | GitHub, GitLab, Node.js, Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS, Jest, Socket.io, REST APIs, Storybook |
| Vscode Extension | ✓ | ✓ |