Ask HN: Cursor vs. Windsurf?
10 points by shrisukhani 4 months ago | 11 commentsThere’s a bunch of them at this point and it’s kinda hard to figure out one over another. Cursor and Windsurf seem like the leading players - curious what people like about one vs the other.
- OriginalMrPink 4 months agoIt was Cursor six months ago, VC with Copilot three months ago, and currently it's Windsurf / Cursor. Copilot is lagging with features, it used to be Chat & Compose, now it's Agents and MCP stuff that's missing. But once it's in there, it just seems more robust and better integrated with everything imo.
- TiredOfLife 4 months agoIMHO best feature of these things is the autocomplete. And Windsurf has that feature for free including the Cursor like Tab Tab (supercomplete in Windsurf)
- ai_coder42 4 months agoThey're all playing a catchup game with each other on features. Some like GH Copilot is really falling behind as of right now. I use cursor because i like how things are set up makes sense to me.
My recommendation: Try both. I mean really give them a fair chance, atleast 2 weeks. and see which one you like. Happy coding!
- olibaw 3 months agoThis isn't shockingly original advice, but it did spur me to stop overthinking it and just spend some time with 'em. Tx!
- olibaw 3 months ago
- 4 months ago
- shrisukhani 4 months agoI’m a happy Cursor user. Main reason is it just works great and was the first one I tried.
- senordevnyc 4 months agoI really wish there was something as good as Cursor for Jetbrains.
- ai_coder42 4 months agoThey did announce Junie. Close enough to cursor i feel. Link: https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/
But, what is stopping you from moving from Jetbrains to Cursor or the likes? AFAIK, most of the functionality can be achieved via plugins / extensions on Cursor.
Just Curious.
- aristofun 4 months agoBecause vs code is just far inferior IDE in comparison to jetbrains.
They (ms) went a long way in customization, bells and whistles, but haven’t yet nailed the basics.
Most of really experienced developers i know hate it.
- decide1000 4 months agoI use Cursor, switch to Jetbrains to validate the code.
I don't like the VScode ui. It feels more like a 1 solution-fits-all. Jetbrains has much deeper understanding of the (debug) tools I use.
Happy customer for 4 years.
- aristofun 4 months ago
- ai_coder42 4 months ago
- gardenhedge 4 months agoI just use vs code and a AI chat like grok or deepseek
- surrTurr 4 months agouse windsurf (or codeium) if you want to put up with cringe hard limits on prompts etc.
imo cursor all the way