GitHub Copilot
"A simpler tool, well-suited for inline assistance and fitting well into fast-paced development environments."
"Code completion is absolutely terrible... The VS Code agent implementation for Copilot is very bad."
The 2025 AI Coding Assistant Landscape
An interactive analysis of GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, and Cursor. This application digests a comprehensive market report, offering a clear, comparative view to help you choose the right AI partner for your development workflow.
Feature Deep Dive
This chart provides a visual summary of each tool's strengths across key development areas. Based on the report's findings, each tool is rated on a scale of 1 to 5. Hover over the points on the chart to see the scores and understand where each assistant excels or falls short.
Pricing at a Glance
Choosing a tool also means understanding its cost. The pricing models for these assistants vary significantly, from straightforward subscriptions to usage-based billing for advanced features. Below is a simplified comparison of the primary individual and team plans to help clarify the investment required.
GitHub Copilot
Best for ecosystem integration and enterprise adoption.
Pro Plan
$10/mo
300 premium requests
Business Plan
$19/user/mo
Centralized management
Most Balanced
Windsurf
Best for innovative agentic features and developer flow.
Pro Plan
~$15/mo
500 prompt credits
Teams Plan
~$30/user/mo
AI Code Reviews
Cursor
Best for power users demanding model flexibility and raw performance.
Pro Plan
$20/mo
"Max Mode" Access
Business Plan
$40/user/mo
Org-wide privacy controls
Jupyter Notebook Usage
For data scientists and researchers, seamless Jupyter Notebook integration is non-negotiable. The assistants are evolving from simple code completion to sophisticated, agent-driven interaction with notebooks. Here's how they stack up.
GitHub Copilot
Leverages VS Code's excellent native `.ipynb` support. Agent can edit across cells and even scaffold new notebooks from a prompt. A key advantage is its ability to ingest cell outputs (including images) for more accurate context.
Windsurf
Offers broad support via a Chrome extension and a dedicated JupyterLab plugin. Deeper integration is achieved via the open-source "Model Context Protocol" (MCP), allowing its Cascade agent to programmatically edit and execute cells while preserving kernel state.
Cursor
Supports both direct `.ipynb` editing with its agent and an AI-friendly workflow using plain `.py` script files. Like Windsurf, it can leverage MCP for deep, programmatic notebook manipulation, bridging the gap between LLMs and the complex notebook format.
Voices from the Community
User reviews provide a crucial reality check on marketing claims. Sentiment is often polarized, highlighting both the immense potential and the occasional frustrations of using these bleeding-edge tools. Here are some representative opinions from the report.
Windsurf
"Noticeably cleaner output with fewer errors... and praised its session memory capabilities via the Cascade system."
"A user with a premium Windsurf account through their workplace described the tool as 'abysmal' and often hindering."
Cursor
"A 2x improvement over Copilot... magic tab completion... how Copilot should feel."
"Common complaints revolve around breaking updates, hijacked keybindings and their overall business model."
The Gemini Perspective
If Google's advanced Gemini 2.5 AI were a human developer, which tool would it choose? Based on Gemini's core strengths—deep reasoning, native multimodality, and a massive context window—the choice would hinge on unrestricted model access and a sophisticated agentic framework.
A human-like Gemini would gravitate towards the tool that allows it to leverage its own full cognitive potential. The key decision criteria would be:
- Model Freedom: Direct access to the most powerful models, including its own Gemini family.
- Context Mastery: The ability to handle and effectively use enormous context windows, on par with its own 1M+ token capacity.
- Agentic Sophistication: A reliable framework to execute complex, multi-step plans derived from its own reasoning.
- Extensibility: Robust support for external tools to match its native multimodal capabilities.
Gemini's Likely Preference: Cursor
As of June 2025, Cursor holds a distinct advantage. Its "Max Mode" provides the "model freedom" Gemini would demand, offering direct, token-based access to a wide range of frontier models, including the Gemini 2.5 series. This, combined with its powerful agentic features designed for deep codebase interaction, would allow a Gemini persona to operate with an engine it understands intimately and at the peak of its capabilities.
Close Contender: Windsurf's innovative "Planning Mode" strongly aligns with Gemini's "thinking model" architecture, making it a very compelling alternative.