Benchmark · Published July 7, 2026
AI Coding Agent Benchmark 2026: MANOVIK vs Cursor vs Windsurf
Which is the best AI for coding in 2026? We ran MANOVIK, Cursor, and Windsurf through SWE-bench Verified plus 80 real-world development tasks from our internal harness. Same models where possible, same hardware, same acceptance criteria.
Methodology
Each agent ran against the SWE-bench Verified 500-issue split with default configuration and no manual intervention. The internal harness adds 80 tasks drawn from real customer projects across three categories: small tasks (under 200 LOC), medium refactors (200-1000 LOC), and greenfield features with tests. Runs happened in an identical dev container on an M2 Pro with a warm dependency cache. Cost figures use each vendor's public API pricing on July 1, 2026 and exclude seat licenses.
SWE-bench Verified results
| Metric | MANOVIK | Cursor | Windsurf |
|---|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified (pass@1) 500-issue Verified split, single attempt, default agent config. | 54.2% | 53.1% | 51.8% |
| SWE-bench Verified (pass@5) Best of five independent runs per issue. | 68.4% | 66.9% | 64.2% |
| Avg. tokens per resolved issue Lower is better. Includes tool-call round-trips. | 112k | 148k | 163k |
| Median wall-clock per issue Measured on identical M2 Pro dev container. | 3m 41s | 4m 12s | 5m 03s |
Internal feature-completion benchmark
| Metric | MANOVIK | Cursor | Windsurf |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feature-completion (small task, <200 LOC) 50 tasks: CRUD endpoints, form components, unit tests. | 2m 10s | 2m 44s | 3m 05s |
| Feature-completion (medium task, 200-1000 LOC) 30 tasks: multi-file refactors, new routes with tests. | 9m 12s | 11m 40s | 13m 20s |
| First-pass PR acceptance rate Human reviewer merges without change requests. | 72% | 65% | 61% |
| Test-suite pass rate on first attempt Existing test suite executed after agent completion. | 81% | 74% | 70% |
| Cost per resolved task (USD) API + tool overhead. Excludes seat licensing. | $0.19 | $0.31 | $0.36 |
What the numbers mean
MANOVIK leads on every headline metric, but the gap on SWE-bench Verified is narrow — a single-digit percentage-point lead is well within the noise you see between agent runs. The larger, more decisive gap shows up on the internal harness, especially on first-pass PR acceptance and test-suite pass rate. That mirrors what we see in production: SWE-bench rewards patching a known bug, while shipping a feature requires the agent to make architectural choices that survive human review.
Cost per resolved task is the other outlier. MANOVIK's planner batches tool calls and avoids redundant file reads, which cuts token spend roughly in half versus Windsurf on medium tasks. On a team completing 500 tasks a month, that difference is $85 versus $180 in API costs alone.
Where competitors win
Cursor still has the strongest tab-completion experience for keystroke-level edits, and its Composer UX is more familiar to developers coming from VS Code. Windsurf's Cascade flow is the best of the three for long-running exploratory sessions where the goal is unclear at the start. If your workflow is dominated by inline autocomplete rather than end-to-end task execution, those tools may still be the better fit.
Reproducing the benchmark
The SWE-bench Verified runs are reproducible with the official harness. Our internal task set is proprietary, but the acceptance criteria are documented: an agent output "passes" only if (1) the existing test suite passes, (2) any new tests written by the agent also pass, and (3) a human reviewer approves the PR without change requests. We plan to publish an anonymized subset of the harness later in 2026.
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