Amazon Q Developer vs Windsurf

A side-by-side comparison of Amazon Q Developer and Windsurf — pricing, free tiers, and who each tool is genuinely best for.

	Amazon Q Developer	Windsurf
Tagline	AWS's AI coding assistant for building, transforming, and operating on AWS	Agentic IDE with Cascade flows that keep you and the AI in sync
Category	AI Coding	AI Coding
Pricing	Free tier; Pro from ~$19/user/mo	Free tier; Pro from ~$15/user/mo; Teams/Enterprise tiers above
Free tier
Best for	Teams building on AWS who want an assistant that understands their cloud services and can automate code transformations.	Developers wanting an AI-native IDE with tightly integrated agentic flows and a generous free tier.
Not for	Developers outside the AWS ecosystem who want a vendor-neutral, frontier-model-first experience.	Teams that prefer to keep their existing editor and just bolt on completions.
Use cases	AWS-aware code completion Java version upgrades Code transformation Infrastructure troubleshooting Agentic feature development	Agentic multi-step edits Codebase-aware autocomplete Feature implementation Refactoring AI chat over your project
	Visit Amazon Q Developer	Visit Windsurf

Choose it if: Teams building on AWS who want an assistant that understands their cloud services and can automate code transformations.

Choose it if: Developers wanting an AI-native IDE with tightly integrated agentic flows and a generous free tier.