The fastest-moving rivalry in AI coding is not the one most articles cover. Everyone compares Codex and Claude Code, but in the IDE-based corner of the market, the fight is between Google’s Antigravity, Cursor, and Windsurf — and that fight is where the big model vendors collide with the tools that developers actually live in. If you do most of your AI coding inside an editor rather than a terminal, this is the comparison that matters for you.
The Three Contenders
Google Antigravity. Google’s AI coding agent, built on Gemini, entered the IDE market with aggressive pricing and deep integration with Google’s model stack. Its pitch is simple: frontier-model reasoning at a price point designed to undercut the incumbents. For developers already in the Google ecosystem, the integration story is the strongest of the three.
Cursor. The incumbent that made AI editing mainstream. Cursor’s moat is its editor experience — the inline diffs, the tab-completion speed, and the ecosystem of extensions that years of users have built around it. It is the safest choice in the category, which is also its weakness: it feels incrementally improved rather than reimagined.
Windsurf. The challenger that positioned itself as the agent-first editor, pushing whole-file and multi-file agentic edits harder than Cursor did initially. Its models rotate across providers rather than being locked to one, which is a real advantage if you like choosing your model separately from your editor.
How They Differ Where It Counts
Speed of the core loop: Cursor still leads on raw tab-completion and inline edit feel. Model quality and price: Antigravity has been the aggressor, pairing Gemini’s capability with pricing that has forced the others to respond. Agentic depth: Windsurf pushes autonomous multi-file changes furthest, with the corresponding risk that it does more than you wanted. If you are deciding, the honest question is not “which is best” but “which failure mode can you tolerate”: Cursor’s incrementalism, Antigravity’s dependence on Google’s models, or Windsurf’s tendency to overreach.
The Vendor-Dependency Question
This category has a hidden axis that most comparisons skip: what happens when the model behind your editor changes. Antigravity’s quality tracks Gemini’s release cycle directly. Cursor and Windsurf both mix providers, which insulates them somewhat from a single vendor’s bad release. If you build long-term habits in an editor, that insulation matters more than any benchmark.
How to Choose
Take a two-week trial of each, on real work, and ignore feature lists. Pay attention to which one you reach for without thinking, and which one fights you when the task gets ambiguous. Pricing shifts fast in this category, check each product’s current page before you commit, because the numbers move quarterly. For the terminal-native alternatives, our comparison of Codex, Claude Code, and Gemini CLI covers that side of the market.
Related: see our comparison of Codex, Claude Code and Gemini CLI