MiniMax vs Windsurf: Side-by-Side Comparison 2026

MiniMax vs Windsurf comparison for 2026. Features, pricing, AI capabilities, and editor support analyzed side by side to help you choose the right coding tool for your workflow.

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 / $20/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 May 4, 2026. MiniMax pricing | Windsurf pricing

Share

Key Differences

  • Category: MiniMax is an AI assistant; Windsurf is an AI IDE.
  • 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.

Share