MiniMax vs Windsurf: Side-by-Side Comparison 2026

MiniMax vs Windsurf comparison 2026. Side-by-side features, pricing & capabilities.

MiniMax is an AI assistant from MiniMax — ai assistant and model provider with coding capabilities. Windsurf is an AI IDE from Cognition — the agentic ai ide.

MiniMax

MiniMax is a Shanghai-based AI company (Hong Kong Stock Exchange listed) offering the MiniMax Agent app and API access to their M2.5 and M2.1 models. M2.5 scores 80.2% on SWE-Bench Verified at roughly 1/20th the cost of Claude Opus. Models work inside Claude Code, Cline, Cursor, OpenCode, and other coding tools via Anthropic- and OpenAI-compatible API endpoints.

  • ✓ AI chat
  • ✓ Agentic mode
  • ✓ Multi-file editing
  • ✓ Terminal commands
  • ✓ Test generation

Free / $10/mo · 6 plans

Windsurf

AI-first IDE with Cascade — an agentic assistant that understands your codebase and makes multi-file changes. Now owned by Cognition (makers of Devin). Also available as Windsurf Plugin for VS Code and JetBrains.

  • ✓ Cascade agentic AI
  • ✓ Code completions
  • ✓ Multi-file editing
  • ✓ Terminal integration
  • ✓ Codebase search

Free / $20/mo · 5 plans

Feature MiniMax Windsurf
Category AssistantAI IDE
Starting Price Free Free
Model Family MiniMaxMulti-model
Open Source Partial (M2.1 open-weight on Hugging Face)No

Pricing verified Feb 11, 2026. MiniMax pricing | Windsurf pricing

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Key Differences

  • Category: MiniMax is an AI assistant; Windsurf is an AI IDE.
  • Starting price: MiniMax starts at $10/mo; Windsurf starts at $20/mo.
  • Model family: MiniMax uses MiniMax; Windsurf uses Multi-model.
  • Open source: MiniMax: Partial (M2.1 open-weight on Hugging Face). Windsurf: No.
  • Bring your own key: Windsurf supports BYOK; MiniMax does not.
  • Platforms: MiniMax runs on API, Desktop, Web; Windsurf runs on Linux, Windows, macOS.
  • Provider: MiniMax is built by MiniMax; Windsurf is built by Cognition.

Which Should You Choose?

Choose MiniMax if you want frontier-level coding at 1/10th to 1/20th the cost of Claude Opus or GPT-5. Choose Windsurf if you want an agentic IDE with autonomous multi-step changes. Read our full reviews to see which fits your workflow.

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