Two code & development tools, one decision. Here is the honest split.
| DeepSeek | Windsurf | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free plan | Free plan |
| Best at | Free, capable code help and reasoning tasks without a subscription. | Letting an agent drive: scaffolding, migrations, and repetitive codebase-wide edits. |
| In short | A strong open-weights model family with a free chat interface, particularly competitive at code and math. | An agentic code editor (from the Codeium team) that plans and executes multi-step coding tasks. |
| On Atlas | 3 starter prompts | 3 starter prompts |
Pick DeepSeek when the job is Free, capable code help and reasoning tasks without a subscription.. Pick Windsurf when the job is Letting an agent drive: scaffolding, migrations, and repetitive codebase-wide edits.. Still torn? Run one real task through both free tiers. An hour of testing beats a week of reviews.
Here is my code: [paste code]. Find the three most likely bugs or edge cases, explain each in one sentence, then show the fixed code with tests.