Gemini CLI vs Windsurf: Which AI Agent Is Better?
An in-depth comparison of Gemini CLI and Windsurf across output quality, autonomy, reliability, speed, value, and ease of use. Vote for your favorite.
An in-depth comparison of Gemini CLI and Windsurf across output quality, autonomy, reliability, speed, value, and ease of use. Vote for your favorite.
Pick a winner in each category. You can change your vote anytime.
Gemini CLIWindsurfChoose Gemini CLI if you are teams on Gemini Code Assist or the paid Gemini API who want an open-source terminal agent with huge context. Choose Windsurf if you are developers who want an affordable AI editor with agentic capabilities.
In our editorial scoring, Windsurf leads in 3 of six categories (autonomy, value and ease of use), while Gemini CLI leads in 0. On price, Gemini CLI runs paid code assist licence or gemini api key (free tier ended june 2026) and is open source; Windsurf runs free / $20 pro / $200 max (as devin desktop) and is proprietary.
Gemini CLI is Google's open-source (Apache 2.0) AI agent for the terminal, with a 1M-token context window that can hold entire codebases, MCP servers, Google Search grounding, and shell command execution in an agentic loop. It is no longer free: on June 18, 2026 Google stopped serving Gemini CLI to free accounts and to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, and replaced it for those users with Antigravity CLI. Gemini CLI itself is still maintained and now runs on a Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise licence or a paid Gemini API key.
Windsurf began as Codeium's AI-first code editor, known for its Cascade agent. Cognition (the company behind Devin) bought it in 2025, and since June 2026 it ships as Devin Desktop, "the next generation of Windsurf": an agent command center with a built-in VS Code-style IDE; windsurf.com now redirects there. Plans are shared with Devin: Free, Pro at $20 a month and Max at $200, each with a usage allowance that refreshes daily and weekly, and extra usage billed at API prices.
Every agent on this page runs on Standard Compute
