Spyder is a free and open source scientific environment for Python. It combines advanced editing, analysis, debugging, and profiling, with data exploration, interactive execution, deep inspection, and visualization capabilities. Spyder is sponsored by open source supporters QuanSight, and NumFOCUS, as well as individual donors.
$0
per month
Windsurf
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Windsurf (formerly Codeium) is an AI dev tool that is self-hosted for security, with features including rapid code autocomplete, in-editor AI chat assistant, repo natural language search, end-to-end data encryption.
$15
per month for 500 prompt credits/month Equivalent to 2,000 GPT-4.1 prompts (4 prompts per credit)
Pricing
Spyder
Windsurf
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Pro
$15
per month 500 credits/mo
Team
$30
per month per user (500 credits/user/mo)
Enterprise
$60
per month per user (up to 200 users & 1,000 credits/user/mo)
Spyder is an open-source Python IDE designed for the movement of data science work. Spyder comes with an Anaconda package manager distribution, so depending on your setup you may have installed it on your machine.
Spyder includes most of the "standard IDE" features you can expect, such as a strong syntax code editor, Python code rendering, and an integrated text browser.
Spyder is used when we want to develop a code that is useful and able to explore proper documentation of the code that has been written. We use Spyder to perform data-related operations like filtration, cleaning, and enhancing the data qualities. There some cases where it is less appropriate like working in an environment, creating dashboards of data visualizations and plots.
If you already have technical knowledge and understanding of coding, Windsurf could be a valuable platform to debug and rewrite code. It was helpful to me to expand coding, since I am not a traditionally programmer. I was able to enhance my base code and functionality much quicker than manually trying.
It is fairly straightforward to use. Pretty much good to go as soon as you install it. The IDE itself is very user friendly, and it is only limited by whatever limitations Python has as a language. Great for those who want to run their scripts quickly or do some Python programming without fussing.
Windsurf is a good tool for developers with more than basic coding skills. I would recommend it as a tool to quickly mitigate coding errors and issues. I did not take a deeper dive into the integrated extensions, but the library of extensions appear to be solid. An experience developer could quickly launch this platform, scan and test coding, and resolve issues quickly. I did not test this for larger code sets.
Most of data scientists or data engineers are either using ec2 on the cloud or Atom or PyCharm locally. It is a bit hard to find people who are still using Spyder and have the sight of the IDE and can help you to answer your question.
I think Spyder doesn't stack up as well as other IDEs due to its many limitations. But it is available for free and that is one advantage it has over its competitors
Windsurf would be more comparable to GitHub Copilot or Perplexity to me. I think it's more of a pure code debugging line by line than some of the other tools listed above, however, they all have some capabilities to rewrite and test new coding. It boils down to what toolset you are most comfortable with. I typically will work with two platforms with the same issue to see how it is approached and the differences.