AI Coding Tools in 2026: Cursor, Copilot and Windsurf Compared

The market for AI coding tools has changed more in 2026 than in any year since GitHub Copilot launched. Cursor is now owned by SpaceX, Windsurf has been renamed Devin Desktop by its owner Cognition, and Tabnine has been bought by the testing company Tricentis. GitHub Copilot has moved to a credit-based model for its agent features. This guide, first published in March 2026 and rewritten in November, sets out where the main tools stand, what they cost according to their own pricing pages and how they handle your code.

Update, 2 November 2026: this comparison has been rewritten. The earlier version predated SpaceX’s acquisition of Cursor, the renaming of Windsurf to Devin Desktop and Tricentis’s purchase of Tabnine, and its prices and some feature claims, including that Cursor could run entirely offline, were out of date or wrong.

GitHub Copilot moves to plans with AI credits

GitHub Copilot remains the most widely available assistant, working in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Eclipse and Xcode as well as on github.com and in a command-line tool. According to GitHub’s Copilot plans page, individual plans are Free, Pro at $10 a month, Pro+ at $39 and Max at $100. Agent mode, code review, cloud agents and the CLI draw on “GitHub AI Credits”, with each paid plan including a base allowance and a variable “flex” allotment on top. Paid plans can assign an issue to Copilot, which then opens a pull request, and review pull requests on GitHub. The same page says GitHub Enterprise now includes access to Copilot.

Copilot’s strength is reach: it works in more editors than any rival and sits next to the code, issues and pull requests on GitHub. Its newer features, such as the generally available Copilot Fusion, keep it close to the agent-first tools. The trade-off is that code is processed in GitHub’s and Microsoft’s cloud; there is no self-hosted Copilot.

Cursor after the SpaceX acquisition

Cursor, the AI-first editor built on VS Code, announced on 14 August 2026 that its parent company Anysphere had been acquired by SpaceX, completing a process that began with a partnership with SpaceX’s AI business in April. Cursor said the deal gives it access to SpaceX’s GPU fleet to train its own models, and it released Grok 4.6 in the same week.

The Cursor pricing page now lists Free, Plus at $8 a month, Premium at $30, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200, with Teams from $30 per user a month. The page says only Grok models are available on Plus, while third-party models on higher plans are billed separately at API list prices. Plus also includes X features such as a premium checkmark, reflecting SpaceX’s bundling of Cursor into the X subscription. Cursor’s own feature set has grown well beyond autocomplete: cloud agents and automations, AI code review through Bugbot, an Agent SDK and a code host, Origin.

Cursor’s cloud models process code on its servers. The earlier version of this guide said Cursor could run entirely offline with local models; it is a cloud-based product, and developers who need fully local processing should look at open-source extensions instead.

Windsurf is now Devin Desktop

Windsurf, originally built by Codeium, passed to Cognition, the maker of the Devin agent, in 2025. On 2 June 2026 Cognition renamed Windsurf to Devin Desktop in an over-the-air update. The editor, extensions and settings carry over, but the default view is now an “Agent Command Center” that manages local and cloud agents on a Kanban board. Cognition says Devin Desktop supports the open Agent Client Protocol, so third-party agents such as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Agent can run inside it alongside Devin.

On the pricing page, which windsurf.com now redirects to, Cognition lists Free, Pro at $20 a month and Max at $200, with Teams at $80 a month plus $40 per full developer seat. Enterprise customers can deploy in their own virtual private cloud.

Tabnine’s sale to Tricentis

Tabnine built its reputation on private deployment for regulated companies. On 30 July 2026 the testing company Tricentis announced that it had acquired Tabnine and would fold its Enterprise Context Engine, which maps an organisation’s code, documentation and dependencies, into Tricentis’s AI testing platform. Terms were not disclosed. Tabnine’s website now redirects to Tricentis, so teams that relied on Tabnine for code completion should check directly with Tricentis what support and product roadmap remain.

Continue and local models for private AI coding

Continue is an open-source extension for VS Code and JetBrains with agent, chat, edit and autocomplete modes. It lets developers bring their own model, including local models served by Ollama, and its documentation includes a guide to running it without an internet connection. That makes it the clearest option among these tools for keeping code entirely on your own hardware. The cost is set-up: you choose and run the model yourself, and local models that fit on a laptop are usually weaker than the large cloud models. Our guides to self-hosting LLMs and model quantisation cover the hardware side.

Comparing Windsurf, Cursor and Copilot on privacy and cost

Prices are as listed on each company’s pricing page on 2 November 2026, in US dollars and before tax. All three commercial tools now meter heavy agent use through credits, quotas or API-priced model usage, so the headline price is a floor rather than a ceiling for anyone who runs agents for long periods.

Three things stand out from this year’s changes. First, ownership now shapes the product. Cursor’s cheapest paid plan is tied to SpaceX’s Grok models and the X subscription, and Devin Desktop is built around Cognition’s own agent, so choosing an editor increasingly means choosing a model supplier too. Teams that want to swap models freely should check which models each plan actually allows. Second, the tools are converging on the same idea: an editor plus agents that take a task, work in the background and return a pull request. Copilot assigns issues to its agent, Cursor runs cloud agents and Devin Desktop puts agent management at the centre, which makes code review and testing more important, not less. Third, consolidation carries a continuity risk. Windsurf users have been through two changes of direction in a year, and Tabnine customers now depend on a testing company’s plans. For companies handling sensitive code, including those subject to UK GDPR or financial regulation, the safest course is to read each vendor’s data-handling terms, keep secrets out of prompts and keep a fallback, such as an open-source extension with a local model, that does not depend on a single supplier.

Sources

1. GitHub: Copilot plans and pricing
2. GitHub Copilot documentation
3. Cursor: Cursor is now a part of SpaceX (14 August 2026)
4. Cursor pricing
5. Cognition: Windsurf is now Devin Desktop (2 June 2026)
6. Devin plans and pricing
7. Tricentis: Tricentis acquires Tabnine
8. Continue documentation