What is Devin Desktop?
The first thing to know is that Windsurf no longer exists by that name. On 2 June
2026 Cognition renamed it Devin Desktop and shipped the change as an over-the-air
update; windsurf.com now redirects to Devin’s site. Plans, settings and
extensions carried across untouched, so nothing broke — but every tutorial,
comparison and support thread written before that date refers to a product name
you will not see in the app.
The deeper change is what it is for. Windsurf sold itself as a fast AI-assisted IDE built around Cascade. Cascade is still here — we previously reported it had been retired on 1 July 2026, and that was wrong; the official documentation still carries a full Cascade section covering modes, workflows, hooks, memories and MCP, and we corrected this on 2 August 2026. What actually changed is emphasis: a second agent, the Devin Local Agent, now sits alongside it, and the editor presents itself first as a console for running coding agents — local and cloud, its own and other vendors’ — through the open Agent Client Protocol.
That is a genuinely good idea, and the implementation is among the better ones. It is simply not the product a lot of people thought they were subscribing to, and that is worth knowing before you renew.
For the day-one workflow after the rename — free Tab + SWE-1.6, Cascade vs Devin Local Agent, ACP multi-agent supervision, and when Cursor still wins — see how to use Devin Desktop. Cloud Devin vs Desktop, pricing shapes, and supervision: Devin AI review. Head-to-head: Cursor vs Windsurf.
Best for: Developers who want a full IDE that treats coding agents as the main event, and who are comfortable being on a product mid-transition.
Devin Desktop pricing
| Plan | Price | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Unlimited tab autocomplete and inline edits, with a modest daily and weekly quota for agent tasks and a restricted model list. Includes free access to the in-house SWE-1.6 model. |
| Pro | $20/mo | The mainstream tier. Note this rose from $15 in March 2026, when the old credit system was retired in favour of daily and weekly quotas. |
| Max | $200/mo | For people running agents more or less continuously. A large jump from Pro with no tier in between, which makes it an awkward upgrade for anyone in the middle. |
| Teams | $80/mo + $40/seat | A base platform fee plus a per-developer seat charge, so small teams pay meaningfully more per head than individuals do. |
Prices checked 2 August 2026. Vendors change limits often — treat the caps as indicative and confirm on the pricing page before you buy.
What Devin Desktop is good at
- Running several coding agents in parallel and reviewing their output in one place
- Working in an editor while delegating longer jobs to a cloud agent and picking them up later
- Teams that want to mix agents — Codex, Claude, Gemini CLI — inside a single editor via the open protocol
- Migrating an existing Windsurf setup without reconfiguring anything
Work out whether the rename affected you
- Open the app. If it updated over the air it is already Devin Desktop — the rename shipped as a background update, not a reinstall.
- Decide which agent you are using. Cascade is still here and still documented; the newer Devin Local Agent sits beside it, and they overlap.
- Confirm which plan you are on. Plans migrated unchanged, but the March 2026 move from credits to daily and weekly quotas changed what your money buys.
- If you mainly used it as a fast AI editor, run the same week's work in Cursor before renewing. The product you are on now is aimed at a different job.
Who should skip Devin Desktop
- Anyone who needs stability of tooling. This product has changed name, pricing model and flagship feature inside eighteen months.
- Developers who just want fast, reliable autocomplete. That is now the least interesting part of what it sells.
- People who dislike hunting for documentation. Most tutorials online still say Windsurf, the official docs say Devin Desktop, and both describe the same app.
What's good
- A genuine IDE, not a chat panel — autocomplete, debugging and multi-file editing all present
- The Agent Client Protocol lets outside agents run inside the editor, so you are not locked to one vendor's model
- A kanban view of agent tasks makes running several jobs at once legible rather than chaotic
- Existing Windsurf plans, settings and extensions carried over automatically in the rename
Watch-outs
- The Windsurf brand is gone, and searching for help now returns documentation under two different product names
- Two overlapping agents now ship side by side — Cascade and the newer Devin Local Agent — and the documentation does not make it obvious which one you should be using
- The product's centre of gravity has moved from 'IDE with AI' to 'console for autonomous agents', which is not what many users originally bought
Devin Desktop FAQ
- What happened to Windsurf?
- Cognition, which acquired Windsurf in July 2025, renamed it Devin Desktop on 2 June 2026 and pushed the change as an over-the-air update. The app, settings, extensions and pricing carried over; the name and the strategic direction did not.
- Do I need to reinstall or migrate anything?
- No. Existing users were migrated automatically. The JetBrains plugin continues separately under its own listing.
- Is Cascade gone?
- No. We previously reported that it had been retired, and that was wrong — corrected on 2 August 2026 after checking the official documentation. Cascade still ships and still has its own full documentation section, covering modes, workflows, hooks, memories and MCP. What changed is that a second agent, the Devin Local Agent, now sits alongside it, and the newer Agent Command Center is what the product leads with.
- Is there still a free version?
- Yes — a free tier with unlimited tab completion and inline edits, plus limited agent-task quotas and access to the SWE-1.6 model. It is usable, but the agent features it gates are the reason to be here.
- Should I use this or Cursor?
- If you want an editor that manages multiple agents and supports outside agents through an open protocol, Devin Desktop is the more interesting product. If you want a fast, stable AI-assisted editor with less churn, Cursor is the safer pick right now.
The verdict
Still a good editor, but no longer the product people meant when they said Windsurf. Cognition has pointed it at agent orchestration, and if that is what you want it is one of the better implementations. If you wanted a fast AI-assisted IDE and nothing more, the change is disruptive enough to be worth re-evaluating against Cursor.