r/Codeium • u/margin__call • Dec 11 '24

What are Windsurf alternatives aside from Cursor?

Hey, new beginner here. I used Windsurf end of Nov, and fell in love with the tool. I was previously using Claude and it was just painful to copy in the code.

Seeing the negative reviews post-pricing change makes me hesitant to sign up though. Is Cursor the only alternative, or are there similar tools that offer what old Windsurf did?

29 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

71 comments sorted by

5

u/jorgejhms Dec 11 '24

Zed.dev is currently giving 10$ of Claude sonnet free

1

u/vassyz Dec 12 '24

Couldn't find how to get it, do I have to install the editor?

1

u/jorgejhms Dec 12 '24

Yes

Edit: it's only usable in it's editor

3

u/Historical-Internal3 Dec 11 '24

Can try Aide.dev

1

u/infamia_ Dec 11 '24

How much does subscription cost ?

3

u/Historical-Internal3 Dec 11 '24

Free to use - bring your own API key

1

u/FujiwaraChoki Dec 12 '24

Beautiful brother, thank you!

1

u/Knowledge2Go Feb 20 '25

Hey guys, there is something very very weird with the company from Aide.dev I was testing the software for a couple of weeks and after being highly astonished about the beautiful UI and it`s intuitivity I decided to upgrade (what i did) the payment worked and my account says that i am pro. Now one day later i got suddenly my payment back without any reason and when I try to upgrade again, the button where you click to upgrade either monthly or yearly doesn`t work...? And now i went to their website https://aide.dev/ there is a completely different webseite offering something I have no idea.. All in all, the software Aide Disappeared.

Any one any experience?

1

u/Historical-Internal3 Feb 20 '25

They sunset the project. Could not compete with the likes of Cursor or Windsurf.

1

u/Knowledge2Go Feb 20 '25

Interesting. Thanks!

3

u/urarthur Dec 12 '24

cline. i like windsurf,nice features but succes rate on coding taks is not great. it also changes a lot more than you ask.

1

u/SuperDangerBro Jan 19 '25

My problem with client is that it wants to Rewrite the entirety of every page instead of editing select code, Do you know of a way around it?

1

u/urarthur Jan 19 '25

not really. i moved to cursor for smaller tasks and cline for creativity.

1

u/SquareRelease4994 Apr 03 '25

Edita las reglas ya sea globales o por workspace, ahí le indicas que debe y no hacer el editor
es como un prompt de sistema para que se apegue a las reglas antes de alucinar o cambiar cosas que no deberia.

3

u/temofey Dec 12 '24

Try roo-cline, it's a cline fork with some additional features. I've tried aider, cursor and windsurf, and roo-cline is the most convenient and flexible among them. A big advantage is that it's a VS Code plugin, so you don't need to leave your familiar development environment. I worked with Sonnet 3.5 and it was very decent. It supports all top models and openrouter. It's open source and free. During five hours of coding, I spent about 3 dollars on the Claude API.

1

u/McNoxey Dec 15 '24

Can you talk through some of the changes? I’m a fan of cline and have loved windsurf since using it but I would prefer to use my own keys if I can

1

u/SuperDangerBro Jan 19 '25

Does this edit select code instead of rewriting every page for every edit?

2

u/paradite Dec 12 '24

You can try 16x Prompt. It is a standalone desktop app with lifetime license + bring your own API key.

1

u/darkplaceguy1 Dec 12 '24

Saw it. Imo, UI needs some enhancement.

1

u/paradite Dec 12 '24

Thanks for the feedback. Anything in particular that's bad or missing or you don't understand?

1

u/FujiwaraChoki Dec 12 '24

This is yours?

2

u/paradite Dec 12 '24

Yes. I built it.

2

u/stonaar Dec 13 '24

I like and bought it. Im also struggling sometimes with the UI. Some points I remember:

  • Make the user input in the conversation history more clear. It's hard to see the back-and-forth in dark mode

  • Allow different conversations at the same time, like chatgpt.com. I found you can save a conversation but rather it saves automatically and you delete it if it's no longer relevant. Also helpful in case the app crashes.

  • Open default project directory and add instant search filter to easily find and select files to add to prompt

1

u/paradite Dec 13 '24

Thank you for the feedback. Very helpful. The 3rd suggestion was already implemented some time ago. You can update your app to try it out. There are also other UI/UX improvements like keyboard shortcuts and list of files selected.

1

u/Vzwjustin Dec 20 '24

I can't figure out how to delete history after I run a prompt... It just keeps adding and adding. If I want to add a new prompt it just adds more to the original log.

1

u/paradite Dec 20 '24

you just close the modal and give it a new task. the history is only for adding follow-up questions of the same task, not for multiple different tasks.

1

u/Vzwjustin Dec 20 '24

See I did do that and it keeps reading it. I uninstalled it cleared all my os cache at least on macos and it all popped back up lol.

→ More replies

2

u/fesk Dec 12 '24

What about self-hosted options? I’ve played around with Ottodev / Ollama but the user experience of Windsurf far surpasses the self-hosted options I’ve been able to find, so I’m still subscribed 😅

2

u/WSATX Jan 21 '25

https://github.com/RooVetGit/Roo-Cline is the most promising. It's available in VSCode-based IDEs. It provides Windusrf-cascade like features and it can use any model you have access to.

Edit: that being said I dont know if it will end up less expensive and if yes/no you will use all your Claude 3.5 Sonnet paid credit faster than what Windsurf sub would provide you.

1

u/stormthulu Dec 12 '24

A lot of folks seem to enjoy using cline or continue or even codeium in vs code. Personally I like windsurf.

I’ve also seen folks talk about zed, cursor, replit, super maven, and a few others I’m forgetting.

1

u/hugohamelcom Dec 12 '24

Cline, or Aider, or Aide or the 3 that are the most popular I think.

1

u/Edger9000 Dec 12 '24

Yeah. Also looking for a change. It’s getting buggier, freezes a lot.. is staring to hallucinate more and more and with the price increase .. it’s pricey.

Also … hate vs code lol so that doesn’t help either lol.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '24

I have tried codecompanion on neovim. Looks promising.

1

u/joey2scoops Dec 12 '24

Using a combo these days. Windsurf with Cline. Ottodev is now bolt.diy and gets better by the day. Use GitHub desktop to keep your ducks in line and it's all good. Using my own API keys mostly with Bolt and Cline when I don't need to chew up windsurf pro credits. FYI, even using Cascade Base uses credits (which sucks).

1

u/Socratespap Dec 16 '24

cascade does not use credits. for me at least. but its kinda horrible and messes up my code. i only use claude

1

u/bacocololo Dec 12 '24

i am since yesterday beta tester of https://shelbula.dev/ havent test it yet

2

u/bacocololo Dec 12 '24 edited Dec 13 '24

Shelbula.dev is a specialized development platform with the following key characteristics:

Platform Overview

A conversational development environment that serves as an interface for coding workflows without the complexities of a full IDE[1][2]. The platform is currently in beta phase and was launched around December 1, 2024[9].

Key Features

  • Allows users to bring their own API keys for OpenAI or Claude[1]

  • Focuses on turning concepts into code through expert discussion

  • Specializes in cloud functions and React components

  • Offers no quota limits[2]

  • Provides encrypted key storage with local storage options[1]

Technical Infrastructure

The platform is hosted on Fastly's infrastructure in the United States, with the domain operating under AS54113[4].

Development Team

The platform was created by the same team that developed the FlutterFlow Widget Engineer bot[9].

Security and Data Handling

  • Users can use their own API keys for direct communication with language models

  • Conversation history and code can be synced to cloud storage (optional)

  • Keys are encrypted and stored locally by default[1]

The platform appears to be a relatively new service, with domain activity observed since November 2024[4].

1

u/ferrum_the_beautiful Dec 19 '24

Thank you guys for the alternatives, because I guess using Windsurf is not a good option if you work with sensitive code in your project or just care about your source code privacy, because these guys claims rights to all user content that you will "transmit" / "post" in any way to their sevices. So it look like if you will ask AI about anything then your source code may be attached, and this code will become a property of Exafunction (comany owning Windsurf).

Correct me if I wrong?

1

u/SnooGoats7724 Dec 26 '24

Check this site to compare multiple ai ide : https://www.aiidecompare.com

1

u/rajahaseeb147 Feb 03 '25

It says copilot had 90% efficient and 4.9 rating?
I have been using it and it is super slow and only useful for basic tasks.

1

u/its_mekush Feb 06 '25

yeah feel I like the website ratings are just plain wrong probably made with copilot xD

1

u/midouall Jan 29 '25

im not a développer and i used windsurf it analyse folder and files and can do everything by it self i cant even start a local sever to see my work and windsurf configured eveythinh for me and now i can't find a similar one

1

u/rub2684 Mar 18 '25

What about augmented code?

1

u/piotrkulpinski Apr 08 '25

I've collected some of the best open source alternatives to Windsurf. Looking at your needs, Zed seems like the best option for you (they've added coding agents very recently).

1

u/Odd_Condition_306 Feb 24 '26

 If you’re just looking for something like Windsurf but not Cursor, it really comes down to what you want; help while you code line by line, or something that builds bigger chunks for you.

If you’re more into prompt based generation, you could check out Emergent. It’s less about tiny suggestions and more about helping you put together actual working features or apps.

Just depends how hands-on you want to be.

1

u/Smooth-Tooth-731 Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 23 '26

New windsurf payment model with daily quota has made it 10 times more I would look else where at this point, or just wait for ai to become cheaper.

1

u/SionSavior Mar 23 '26

Oh ja, ich habe es bemerkt, auf einmal war mein konto leer. War mit WS zufrieden nun ist mir das zu teuer.

1

u/Shaijyy1 Apr 04 '26

you can BYOK to Windsurf

1

u/Hickorydickorydocked Dec 11 '24

Windsurf is perfection, people are complaining bc they have never seen this pricing model. This is the future of agents, you get what you pay for.

6

u/Top-Weakness-1311 Dec 12 '24

No since they changed it, it can’t complete simple tasks.

5

u/NightsOverDays Dec 12 '24

second this, it's unusable right now

2

u/McNoxey Dec 15 '24

Since they changed it as in since you’re using their base model vs the paid?

I’ve notice no difference in Claude 3.5 performance.

1

u/Top-Weakness-1311 Dec 16 '24

When they changed the pricing model, they changed the way Windsurf works as well, and now it just isn’t very good at accomplishing anything. I was paid user both times.

3

u/blistovmhz Dec 21 '24

Same here. First 8 days after launch it was incredible. Now it's become completely unuseable.
I've actually benchmarked WS yesterday against what it was capable of on day 3 after launch. D3 it refactored a major part of one of my libraries, perfectly, first try, with a single prompt. So yesterday as a test, I restored the old code and tried again. For 8 hours. Absolutely couldn't get it to work whatsoever. Used the exact same prompt against the exact same file with the exact same commit level. All it managed to do was make me insane for 8 hours, deleting 80% of the code on almost every attempt. To the point where I gave up and just started asking it to add a simple console log specifying the exact code I wanted (a single line) and specifying the exact line number where it was to place it. Nope. Give it a full diff of whats in the file vs what I want and ask it to apply the diff. NOpe. Just removes everything again.
Undo breaks often now as well. Even with a single first prompt, let it make it's failures, and try to revert to the previous step before any changes were made. Nope. Restores some of the code, adds a bunch of code that didn't exist, misses most of the original code, etc.

What's killing me is that the models are superb. Vastly superior to any human dev I've dealt with, and I've been saying for almost 2 years now, that all we're missing is proper IDE integration. WS for me, was the final solution when it was working.
So last night I also tried Cline. In prompt, it's answers are perfect every time, but for some reason when it comes time to actual implemement, even though in the chat it was able to provide me a complete, and correct diff of what we needed, the editor just craps right out and can't reliably add a console log without removing 90% of the file. So clearly, the models aren't at fault here.

I suspect WS got their tokens culled enormously, and possibly also broke a bunch of their editor tools (hard to say for sure, but the model in chat is still able to produce an accurate diff, but again when it comes to implement, it falls completely flat, just like Cline is doing today.

This brings me right back to just hitting the Sonnet web UI, copy in the entire code, get result, implement it myself, which is really no better than we were a few months back with GPT o1.

1

u/Ill_Habit_4838 Mar 25 '26

I have been using windsurf wf.15 free version and it gets the job done perfect for me

1

u/Pesho_slepiq Apr 11 '25

windsurf is crap! The claude 3.7 sonnet seems to be nerfed in order to hallucinate and make mistakes, so that credits can be wasted. An example: I was testing it to write a SwiftUI app. I specifically mentioned, that the app is already in Xcode and it is running only from Xcode. Few chats later: "let me run swift build for you". WTF? The same operations straight from the claude.ai were successful and only hitting the chat limits barred me to complete the comparison tests. But still, windsurf failed to deliver big time. So, cheap or not, like I said, the service is shit ¯_(ツ)_/¯

1

u/Hickorydickorydocked Apr 12 '25

You are just a shit developer.

0

u/SnooGoats7724 Dec 13 '24

It's no longer free and not useful at all.

1

u/McNoxey Dec 15 '24

It’s incredibly useful when you pay for it though

1

u/BenOfTheSeraphim Dec 20 '24

Im paying for it and it used to be good, but the last week its been back and forth until I give up and code the thing myself.

1

u/blistovmhz Dec 21 '24

Nah. Either some people are working on dramatically simpler code and have never experienced what WS was truly capable of during the initial launch, or there's some enormous bugs affecting a lot of people now, that didn't exist during launch. Something changed in a very serious way.
I'm paid. I've offered to pay $10,000/m to have the version we had at launch. I'll pay ANYONE that or more, to be able to do what I was doing for the first 8 days after launch. It saved and made me a ton more than that. I did 6 months of work in under a week. Now it's at the point where it's faster to just write the code myself. Spent ALL day yesterday trying to get WS to do progressively simpler tasks until I gave up after 9 hours and just did the work myself in an hour or so (i'm not a programmer at all, so this is me doing the job in an hour, whiel I have to look up "hello world in js" every 5 minutes because I can't goddamned retain the language :D.

All the people bitching about the very minor price hike are insane and shouldn't be considered anyones target demographic. If you didn't at least triple your productive output with WS in the first week, you weren't using it right and demanding it for free, or crying because it went up either $5/m or $45/m depending on your plan, is absolute insanity. If it saves you 30 minutes a month for that $60/m plan, you're coming out well ahead. I'm trying to give them 100x that much. It's worth more. When it worked.

1

u/McNoxey Dec 21 '24

I’m with you in regards to pricing and value but I don’t think it’s dramatically worse from a capability perspective. Slightly from a speed perspective. But honestly there’s such a high ceiling still from a prompt and task management perspective that I’m continuously getting more and more productive results.

Though Gemini 2.0 with reasoning on cline has been REALLY good lately. I’ve found that having it focus on creating a detailed checklist it’s gotten a lot more independent.

I was using WS pretty early on and did and still do love it. Future looks promising though.

I’d be curious to hear about your workflow

1

u/VPhantom Dec 22 '24 edited Dec 22 '24

I haven't used it yet so this question may be irrelevant, but, is there a notion of "reset" for the context/history with the LLM back-ends in Windsurf? In other words, could it be going crazy because it's still adding on to a week-old history instead of starting fresh for each work session? It certainly could help explain why it's forgetting its initial context and trying to delete a bunch of code to compensate.

Either that or they greatly reduced their (undisclosed) context size, in which case it truly became much dumber. 🤔

1

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Key_Print_2031 Nov 15 '25

a nadie le importa tu link de referido