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AIToolGrade's content is produced using Claude Code, a coding agent from Anthropic. Devin Desktop is a direct competitor to Claude Code — and, in a wrinkle worth naming, it can now run Claude Agent inside it through the open Agent Client Protocol. So we're reviewing a rival to a tool we use daily, one that also hosts that tool. We've applied our standard research methodology — documented features, verified pricing, community sentiment — and worked to assess the product on its own merits. The score reflects what the evidence supports, not what's convenient for us.
On June 2, 2026, Cognition retired the Windsurf brand and relaunched the IDE as Devin Desktop in an over-the-air update. If you're searching for "Windsurf," this is the product you'll land on — same VS Code base, same keybindings and extensions, but a different direction. The signature Cascade agent is being retired (support ends July 1, 2026), the new Agent Command Center is the default surface, and the product now runs third-party agents like Codex, Claude Agent, and OpenCode through the open Agent Client Protocol. We've kept the "Windsurf" references below so the history stays legible — but the current reality is Devin Desktop, a product mid-transition. This review assesses the product as it stands today, with the transition itself treated as a real factor in the verdict.
You can't evaluate this tool in 2026 without understanding what happened to the company behind it. Over roughly a year, the product cycled through three names and three owners — and that history directly shapes what you'd be adopting today.
It began as Codeium, founded by Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, and rebranded to Windsurf in late 2024. Then the bidding started. OpenAI reportedly offered around $3 billion to buy Windsurf outright; that deal collapsed in mid-2025. Google stepped in with a roughly $2.4 billion reverse-acquihire — not buying the company, but hiring the people who mattered: Mohan, Chen, and around 40 core engineers. With the founding talent gone, Cognition — the company behind Devin, one of the most autonomous coding agents in the category — acquired what remained for about $250 million.
The culmination came on June 2, 2026: Cognition retired the Windsurf name entirely and relaunched the IDE as Devin Desktop in an over-the-air update. Google got the people who built Windsurf; Cognition got the product, folded it into the Devin family, and renamed it. For anyone evaluating it now, the practical question isn't who won the bidding war — it's whether the product remains coherent through a rebrand that's also retiring its best-known feature. That question runs through the rest of this review.
Devin Desktop is a VS Code-based, AI-native IDE — the product that was Codeium, then Windsurf, now owned and rebranded by Cognition. The June 2026 rebrand was deliberately low-friction: per Cognition, the IDE, extensions, keybindings, language servers, workflows, MCP connections, and existing plans all carry over, with "only the name and branding" changing on day one. So the editor you'd open is, mechanically, the same one Windsurf users have run for the past year.
By the adoption numbers it inherited, the product sits near the top of the category: a reported 1M+ active users, an estimated $82–100M ARR, thousands of enterprise customers, and a #1 placement on the LogRocket AI Dev Tool Power Rankings in February 2026 (all figures predate the rebrand and are reported by the company or secondary sources, not independently audited).
That's the tension worth naming up front. The bones are strong and the new multi-agent direction is interesting. What's unsettled is the transition: a brand-new identity, a signature feature on the way out, and a roadmap now steered by Cognition's broader Devin ambitions. As a tool to use this week, it holds up. As a tool to standardize a large engineering org on for the next three years, the calculus is more complicated — and the next two sections are why.
The clearest signal of where Devin Desktop is heading is the Agent Command Center, now the default surface. Instead of opening straight into the editor, you land on a Kanban-style board that manages every local and cloud agent in one place, with "Spaces" grouping related sessions, pull requests, files, and context. It reframes the product from "an editor with an AI assistant" toward "a control room for a fleet of agents."
What makes that more than a UI change is the open Agent Client Protocol (ACP). Devin Desktop can run third-party agents — Cognition's docs list Codex CLI, Claude Agent, OpenCode, Junie, and Gemini CLI, plus any ACP-compatible agent — with the same interface as native Devin: they appear in the Kanban board, run inside Spaces, and share context. This is a genuine differentiator. Most AI IDEs lock you into one vendor's model and agent; Devin Desktop is betting on an open layer where you bring whichever agent you trust for the task. Two caveats worth knowing: ACP agents require a Pro, Max, or Teams plan, and when you run an external agent, Cognition's privacy and legal terms don't cover it — billing and data handling fall to that provider.
It's an unusual position. Devin Desktop competes with Claude Code, yet ACP lets you run Claude Agent inside it. The open-agent direction is the most compelling reason to take the rebrand seriously rather than just wait it out.
Here's the part that should weigh on the decision: Cascade — the feature Windsurf was known for — is being end-of-lifed. Cognition has said legacy Cascade support continues through July 1, 2026, after which it's discontinued. Its replacement is Devin Local, rewritten in Rust and described as up to ~30% more token-efficient, with subagent support — positioned as the successor to Cascade as the primary local agent.
On paper, a faster and more efficient local agent is an upgrade. In practice, retiring the single most recognizable feature weeks after a rebrand is a lot of change at once, and it carries real switching cost: teams with CI or automation that explicitly invokes Cascade have to repoint it to Devin Local, and there's no indefinite opt-out. If you adopted Windsurf specifically for Cascade's read-run-observe-iterate loop, the honest framing is that you're moving to a new engine — a promising one, but new — on Cognition's timeline, not yours.
The feature set is deep, and a few pieces are distinctive in the category. Here's what actually matters, accounting for what's changing.
Cascade was the defining feature: it didn't just suggest code, it read your files, ran terminal commands, observed the output, and iterated until a task was done — the feedback loop that separates an agent from autocomplete. As covered above, it's being retired on July 1, 2026 in favor of Devin Local, a Rust rewrite that keeps the same agentic loop while claiming better token efficiency and subagent support. The capability survives the transition; the name and engine underneath it do not.
SWE-1.6 is Cognition's in-house coding model and the current default (it supersedes the post-acquisition SWE-1.5). Cognition markets it as the fastest coding model available, with high-throughput inference that targets the exact pain point of agentic coding on large repos: the lag while an agent loads context. Speed sounds like a vanity metric until you've waited on a slow agent loop; a model tuned for throughput is one of the clearer arguments that Cognition's ownership is adding capability, not just absorbing a competitor. As with any vendor benchmark, treat the "fastest" claim as the company's own positioning.
Codemaps is visual codebase navigation — it renders the relationships between files and components so you can see how a system fits together rather than spelunking through imports. On a small project it's a nicety. On a large, unfamiliar codebase it's the difference between an hour of orientation and ten minutes, and it pairs naturally with Cascade when you need the agent to work across modules.
Fast Context is the product's approach to deep codebase understanding on large projects. It loads relevant context faster than many competitors, which is exactly where most AI IDEs bog down — the bigger the repo, the slower and less accurate the assistance tends to get. Combined with SWE-1.6's throughput, it's a big part of why the tool holds up on real production codebases rather than just demos.
The Coding Agent is the autonomous GitHub issue handler. Point it at an issue and it reads the ticket, writes the code, and submits a pull request without manual intervention. This is the feature that most clearly overlaps with Cognition's Devin — and it's a preview of where the merged roadmap is heading: less "assist the developer in the editor," more "hand the work off and review the PR." The Agent Command Center is the surface that ties these handoffs together.
The product isn't locked to its VS Code base — it ships plugins for JetBrains, Vim, Xcode, and 40+ environments in total. That's a quiet advantage over Cursor, which runs only as a VS Code fork. If your team lives in IntelliJ, or you're an iOS developer in Xcode, Devin Desktop is one of the few serious AI-native options, and its editor reach is among the widest in the category.
Flows and Hooks are the advanced automation workflows — a way to wire custom, repeatable agent behaviors into your process. The capability is useful, but it's also where the product shows its seams: documentation has been thin, and getting the most out of these features takes more trial and error than it should. That seam matters more during a transition, when behaviors built around Cascade may need rework for Devin Local.
Features and ease of use carry the score — the VS Code base is clean, the agent loop is intuitive, and the 40+ plugins plus a free tier lower the barrier to entry. Integration rises with the ACP pivot: an open layer that runs Codex, Claude Agent, and OpenCode inside one IDE is a real differentiator. The offsetting weak point is maturity, not capability — the rebrand, the Cascade end-of-life, and a roadmap now tied to Cognition's Devin strategy make the near-term trajectory the least predictable thing about the product. Net of those opposing moves, the composite holds at 8.2.
Pricing carried over from Windsurf largely intact through the rebrand, and it now runs on a quota model rather than fixed request counts — quotas refresh on a daily/weekly basis, with cost per message varying by model and task complexity, and overage purchasable at API rates. Figures below are verified on the Devin Desktop pricing page as of June 2026.
An ownership saga reshaped the company: it began as Codeium, rebranded to Windsurf, drew a ~$3B OpenAI bid (fell through), then a ~$2.4B Google reverse-acquihire of the founders and ~40 staff, then a ~$250M Cognition acquisition of the remainder. On June 2, 2026 Cognition retired the Windsurf name and relaunched the IDE as Devin Desktop. Cascade is being retired (July 1, 2026) in favor of Devin Local; the in-house model is now SWE-1.6; the Agent Command Center and the open ACP layer are the new default direction. Product strategy is now tied to Cognition's Devin roadmap.
This is the part that should shape an enterprise decision. Cognition's flagship product is Devin — a highly autonomous coding agent aimed at hands-off, supervise-the-PR workflows. Devin Desktop is an IDE you drive directly. Folding the two together is a coherent vision, but the merge is actively underway, and a buyer today is buying into the middle of it.
Three things make the near term hard to predict. The brand is weeks old. The signature Cascade engine is being retired on the company's timeline, not yours. And the product's center of gravity is shifting from "an editor you drive" toward "a command center for a fleet of agents you supervise" — a direction the Agent Command Center makes explicit. None of that is inherently bad; the ACP openness is a real bet worth respecting. But it's change layered on change.
The honest assessment: the product is capable today, and its 12-month roadmap is simply less predictable than Cursor's, which remains an independent company answering only to its own users. For solo developers and small teams, the uncertainty is manageable — switching costs stay low, and the editor still works the way it did under Windsurf. For enterprises making multi-year tooling commitments, the reasonable move is to let the dust settle before standardizing on it. It's also worth watching how Google Antigravity evolves, given Google now employs the original Windsurf founders.
Devin Desktop (the former Windsurf) and Cursor are the two tools most developers actually cross-shop, and they've landed with genuinely different philosophies. Here's the side-by-side.
| Devin Desktop | Cursor | |
|---|---|---|
| Core model | SWE-1.6 (in-house) + ACP agents | Claude/GPT (user-selectable) |
| Multi-agent | Open ACP: Codex, Claude Agent, OpenCode, Gemini CLI | Cursor agents only |
| Agentic feature | Devin Local (Cascade successor) + Agent Command Center | Composer + Background Agents |
| IDE plugins | 40+ (JetBrains, Vim, Xcode, VS Code) | VS Code fork only |
| Free tier | ✓ Light agent quota | ✗ None |
| Entry price | $20/month (Pro) | $20/month (Pro) |
| Ownership | Cognition AI (rebranded June 2026) | Independent |
| Roadmap stability | In transition (rebrand + Cascade EOL) | Settled |
| Best for | Multi-IDE teams, open multi-agent setups | VS Code users, heavy single-vendor agent workflows |
The clean read: Devin Desktop wins on multi-IDE reach, an open multi-agent layer, and having a real free tier; Cursor wins on a settled roadmap and its position as an independent company. At similar entry prices, the deciding factors are usually which editor you live in, whether the open-ACP direction appeals, and how much the transition risk bothers you.
The product rewards a few clear profiles and asks others to weigh the transition more carefully.
Start on the free tier — a light agent quota, no credit card required.
Visit Devin Desktop →The product that was Windsurf — now Devin Desktop — remains a capable AI code editor in 2026. SWE-1.6 keeps it fast, the open ACP layer lets it run Codex, Claude Agent, and OpenCode inside one IDE, the 40+ IDE plugins give it reach few rivals match, and a free tier makes it easy to try. The underlying editor carried through the rebrand essentially unchanged.
The caveat isn't really about capability; it's about timing. Cognition rebranded the product in June, is retiring its signature Cascade engine on July 1 in favor of Devin Local, and is steering the roadmap toward its broader Devin strategy — three changes stacked close together. Today the recommendation is conditional: for developers who want an open multi-agent setup, or who live in JetBrains, Vim, or Xcode, it's a strong choice at $20/month. Just go in understanding you're adopting a capable tool with a less predictable near-term trajectory than its independent rival — manageable for individuals and small teams, worth letting settle before an enterprise standardizes on it.