What happened to Windsurf, and what is Devin Desktop?
Cognition bought Windsurf in July 2025 and folded it into the Devin line. The June 2026 rename made the Agent Command Center the default surface — a Kanban view of every local and cloud agent — while keeping the editor underneath: the blog describes “a full IDE with an agent manager built in”, whose “editor, extensions, keybindings, LSPs, and workflows … are all there and backwards-compatible with Windsurf and VSCode”. The local agent changed too. Devin Local, rewritten in Rust, is now the primary local agent and the one new tabs default to; Cascade, the agent Windsurf was known for, is its predecessor. The vendor's own pages are not consistent about how long Cascade stays — the rename post gives it “through July 1st”, the Cascade documentation still lists it as one of two local agents — so treat Devin Local as the agent you will actually be using. Devin Desktop also runs third-party agents over the Agent Client Protocol, including Codex, Claude Agent and OpenCode, and it is one surface among several: Devin Cloud, Devin CLI and Devin Review are the others.
Is Devin Desktop an app builder or a coding agent?
A coding agent with an IDE around it, and it goes further toward shipping than most. Previews open the running app “either in the IDE or in the browser”, in a pane beside the agent, and you can click an element or an error and send it into the prompt. App Deploys put a site on Netlify from inside the editor — the getting-started page calls it “Deploy applications in one click” — at a public <name>.windsurf.build address, with 1 deployment a day and 1 unclaimed site on Free, 5 of each on Pro. The limits are the honest part: deploys run through Cascade tool calls and are “unavailable with the Devin Local agent”, the deployment is “intended primarily for preview purposes”, and the subdomain cannot be changed after the fact unless you claim the project on your own Netlify account. Buildra sits on the other side of that: the app publishes to a buildra.page address from the same screen, and Buildra also builds phone apps and uploads them to App Store Connect and Google Play for you on a paid plan, from your own developer accounts.
What are the alternatives to Devin Desktop (Windsurf)?
People who search for a Devin AI or Windsurf alternative usually want one of two things. The first is another AI code editor: Cursor is the closest like-for-like IDE, GitHub Copilot keeps you in VS Code or JetBrains, Claude Code and Codex work from the terminal, and Cline and other open-source agents run inside an editor you already use. The second is the application itself, without an editor at all: AI app builders such as Buildra, Lovable, Bolt.new and Replit take a description and produce a running app. Buildra is in that second group — an agent builds the app in a live project you can watch, every commit is mirrored to a GitHub repository you own, and the app publishes to a buildra.page address from the same screen. If you want the editor, pick from the first group; the rest of this page is for the second.
How does pricing compare between Buildra and Devin Desktop?
Cognition prices Devin Desktop as part of Devin. Free is $0 with “a light quota to code with agents”, limited model availability and unlimited inline edits and Tab completions; Pro is $20 a month, Max $200, and Teams is $80 a month for the plan plus $40 a month per full developer seat, with Enterprise on request. Usage is not a credit balance: paid plans carry “a usage allowance that refreshes automatically on a daily and weekly basis”, cost per message varies with the model and the task, and past the allowance you buy extra usage “consumed at API pricing”. Pro and Max cap concurrent sessions at 10, Teams and Enterprise are unlimited, and the Free plan lists none. No annual price is published anywhere on the pricing page. Buildra bills the account rather than the seat: Free is 5 credits a day, up to 25 a month, across up to 3 projects, with the source download and the GitHub mirror included from the start; the paid plans run from Starter at $25 a month for 100 credits to Pro from $100 for 400, with a year costing ten months.
What happens to the code, and who should pick which?
In Devin Desktop the code is already yours — it is the folder you opened, with Git built into the editor and GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket listed among the integrations; cloud agents carry the same work into pull requests, and Enterprise adds SAML/OIDC SSO, centralised admin controls and a deployment in your own virtual private cloud. Buildra has none of that: no roles, no SSO, no audit logs, no self-hosting. What Buildra has is the other end of the job — a project can start from a repository you already have on GitHub, every commit the agent makes is mirrored out to a repository you own, the source is downloadable as a .tar.gz on the free tier, and the dashboard is in English, Arabic, Spanish and French. Two limits belong in the same breath: the mirror runs one direction only, so a push you make on GitHub does not come back into Buildra, and Buildra does not open branches or pull requests or run CI for you.