Kavia AI vs. Windsurf: Enterprise Development Platform Comparison

Kavia AI vs. Windsurf: Comparison

1. Feature Comparison

Windsurf is a developer-first IDE experience. Kavia is an enterprise-first, cross-functional workflow platform that spans the full software development lifecycle.

Context & Tools

Kavia: Multi-repo context. Pulls requirements (Epics/User Stories), source across repos, knowledge graph, MCP-like tool integrations, web UI, and VS Code extension. @-mentions for files, tools, external assets.

Windsurf: Full repo context, curated docs awareness; supports MCP to connect external tools/services; @-mentions for files/functions; local indexing.

Autonomy Level

Kavia: High — can plan, generate code, fix lint errors, run scans, run tests, fix errors, and iterate with minimal prompting; targets broader workflow automation beyond code changes.

Windsurf: High inside the editor — multi-file edits, run/preview apps, fix lint errors automatically; autonomy scoped to IDE session and project.

Frameworks Supported

Kavia: Scaffolding for top 30 web, native, mobile and backend frameworks. DevOps agent that can automatically generate scaffolding for other frameworks.

Windsurf: Framework scaffolding supported primarily through developer-driven workflows.

Deployment Model

Kavia: Web app platform supports hosting for user apps (frontends via AWS Amplify; backends via AWS Fargate). Previews accessible through Web app or IDE extensions. Web-based preview for Native desktop apps using VNC.

Windsurf: Desktop app (macOS/Windows/Linux). Built-in Previews and one-click deploy from the IDE for web apps.

Extensibility

Kavia: Tool/agent plugin integrations; MCP-style extensions; first-party DB option using Supabase. Visual Studio extensions supported on Web based editor.

Windsurf: MCP plugins (GitHub, Azure MCP server, etc.), terminal commands, code lenses, commands-in-terminal, model selection.

Collaboration

Kavia: End-to-end workflow artifacts (requirements, plans, code, tests) with traceability and incremental updates and versioning; Sharable and clonable conversations. Multi-user support built-in from ground level.

Windsurf: Shareable Cascade conversations.

Governance

Kavia: Usage dashboards for team level usage visibility. Role-based approval/merge rights. Team/project level settings for approved LLMs, artifact format, coding rules, CI setup, orchestration rules, Code scanning rules, dev environment setup. Git branch management for individual session. Roll-back and roll forward options.

Windsurf: Teams/Enterprise admin controls, shareable Cascade conversations, org-level MCP whitelisting; security docs provided.

Where Each Shines

Kavia: Program-level acceleration across the whole SDLC; multi-team alignment; generating code with rapid preview + tests + CI/CD; handle large projects with large codebases and teams. Generating project artifacts with custom format (PRDs, Design Docs, Interface docs, etc).

Windsurf: Rapid code iteration inside an IDE; multi-step edits with immediate app preview; tight developer-in-the-loop UX.

Project Planning: Requirements

Kavia: Analyze, refine, and break down requirements into Epics/User Stories with traceability.

Windsurf: N/A - These capabilities highlight Kavia's upstream role in planning and design, which are outside Windsurf's IDE-focused scope.

Architecture & Interface Design

Kavia: Generate system architecture, define interfaces, create detailed design artifacts.

Windsurf: N/A - These capabilities highlight Kavia's upstream role in planning and design, which are outside Windsurf's IDE-focused scope.

Visualization of Artifacts

Kavia: Auto-generate diagrams (architecture, workflows, interfaces) tied to requirements, architecture and code.

Windsurf: N/A - These capabilities highlight Kavia's upstream role in planning and design, which are outside Windsurf's IDE-focused scope.

Documentation Generation & Updating

Kavia: Automatically generate and continuously update documentation alongside evolving codebases.

Windsurf: N/A - These capabilities highlight Kavia's upstream role in planning and design, which are outside Windsurf's IDE-focused scope.

2. Key Differentiators

Kavia Enterprise Knowledge Graph

Kavia creates Knowledge graphs to store indexed information about code, company documentations and project information. These are custom knowledge graphs using Kavia's proprietary format which allows LLMs to easily load its context with the most relevant information for the topic at hand. This approach allows Kavia micro agents to be surgical in their pursuit for the right information for the task at hand. Source code knowledge graphs are stored right inside the repository so that each branch has a version which is accurate with changes corresponding to that branch. Document knowledge graphs rely on a special implementation of agentic retrieval from the knowledge graph that gets to the core of the topic real fast and without wasting a lot of LLM context.

Full Project Creation from Prompts or Documents

Kavia can create a plan for a full project that contains several containers and components from either simple prompts or from extensive input documents like PRDs, BRDs, Figma assets, Screenshots, Architecture documents, API documents or even meeting notes. Every step of this plan could be either auto generated or interactively generated/refined based on user-feedbacks. These plans could be reviewed and approved by multiple approvers and later given to Kavia Code generators to be converted to full working code.

Unified Chat

Kavia Unified chat allows the user to connect all project related assets and external assets using a familiar chat interface and integrate these into Kavia features for question answering, document generation, deep analysis or for code generation. Users could ask Kavia to assess the complexity for a new user story, or analyze a bug in JIRA and come up potential root cases, analyze logs from Datadog sessions, or to extract a Figma and implement all the screens from that Figma.

Sessions and Collaboration

Kavia provides session management through its Visual Studio Code extension. Users can maintain session histories, revisit past sessions, and continue from where they left off. When a session is resumed, the relevant source code is automatically checked out, ensuring continuity.

Kavia allows sessions—whether local via the VSC extension or cloud-based—to be cloned. Clones can be modified independently of the original, supporting both rollbacks to earlier checkpoints and new continuations without affecting the original work.

Sessions in Kavia are not bound to a single environment. Users may seamlessly continue a local session in the cloud or migrate a cloud session back to a local environment, offering flexibility for different workflows.

Kavia supports session sharing. Users can share sessions with collaborators, who may then either continue directly or clone them for independent exploration. This feature is especially valuable for peer reviews and collaborative development.

Manager Dashboard

Kavia provides a set of usage dashboards that will let a manager see the usage activity for their teams. This will immediately give insights on which team members have mastered Kavia and who may still need training, which features are heavily used or under utilized, and results that the team is getting from Kavia sessions. Since a lot of AI rollouts in enterprises fail due to lack of training and adoption, these dashboards will help managers to fine-tune and adapt their rollouts.

Clean Code

Kavia generates production-ready code that adheres to enterprise standards and best practices, even with basic prompting. The platform automatically incorporates proper error handling, security considerations, documentation, testing frameworks, and architectural patterns without requiring detailed specifications from developers. This capability significantly reduces the gap between prototype code and production-ready implementations, ensuring that generated code meets enterprise quality standards for maintainability, scalability, and reliability from the outset.

3. Enterprise Features

Windsurf provides a capable agentic IDE, but its enterprise deployment and compliance posture show gaps for healthcare-grade DevOps. Kavia matches Windsurf's advertised security certifications while surpassing it in default ZDR, deployment flexibility, and audit controls. More importantly, Kavia extends far beyond the IDE, orchestrating the full SDLC with stronger performance and governance.

For enterprises, Kavia offers a platform designed for long-term adoption in regulated, large-scale environments — secure enough for today, and extensible for tomorrow.