Buildkite
Buildkite is forcing a major agent upgrade and handing agents a shortcut through failures.
Comparison · Infra & APIs
Windsurf vs Knock
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Windsurf and Knock — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Windsurf vs Knock: at a glance
| Feature | Windsurf | Knock |
|---|---|---|
| Sector | Infra & APIs | Infra & APIs |
| Velocity score | 0.0 | 6.3 |
| Sparks · 30d | 0 | 1 |
| Top themes | agentic-coding, devin, code-review, ide | notifications, workflow-orchestration, developer-experience, agent-native |
| Last editorial update | 2h ago | 1h ago |
| Website | Visit → | — |
What is Windsurf?
Windsurf is being rebuilt as Devin's front end — the IDE now ships the agent, the CLI, and the reviewer.
Every substantive item in this window is a Devin capability arriving inside Windsurf under the existing subscription: the Devin local agent, Devin for Terminal as a Rust CLI, and now Devin Review and Quick Review for checking AI-written code. The editor's own releases are increasingly about managing agents rather than editing text, with an Agent Command Center inbox, session sorting, and switching performance. Frontier models — Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, SWE-1.6 — are added as routine availability notes.
What is Knock?
Notification infrastructure grows a memory: workflows can now wait on the real world.
Knock sells notification infrastructure — workflows, broadcasts, in-app guides, and multi-channel delivery that product teams wire up instead of building themselves. July was dense and unusually broad: a rebuilt Notion-style template editor, saved views and tags, schema management for how properties surface across the dashboard, passkey login, branch rebasing, and sandbox test runs that skip delay steps. Underneath the polish, two structural additions landed — message events syncing into the data warehouse, and a workflow step that pauses until an event arrives.
Windsurf vs Knock: editorial side-by-side
Windsurf
0.0INFRA · APIS
Windsurf is being rebuilt as Devin's front end — the IDE now ships the agent, the CLI, and the reviewer.
◆ Current state
Every substantive item in this window is a Devin capability arriving inside Windsurf under the existing subscription: the Devin local agent, Devin for Terminal as a Rust CLI, and now Devin Review and Quick Review for checking AI-written code. The editor's own releases are increasingly about managing agents rather than editing text, with an Agent Command Center inbox, session sorting, and switching performance. Frontier models — Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, SWE-1.6 — are added as routine availability notes.
◆ Where it's heading
The IDE is becoming one surface among several onto a shared agent harness that also runs in the terminal and in the cloud, with sessions handed between them. The review tooling signals where the bottleneck has moved: once agents write most of the code, the scarce capacity is checking it, so Cognition is shipping the reviewer alongside the writer. Bundling all of it into one subscription rather than pricing per agent is the commercial posture.
◆ Prediction
Expect the agent inbox to keep absorbing IDE surface — more parallel sessions, review as a gate on agent output — and further parity between the terminal, cloud, and editor entry points.
Knock
6.3INFRA · APIS
Notification infrastructure grows a memory: workflows can now wait on the real world.
◆ Current state
Knock sells notification infrastructure — workflows, broadcasts, in-app guides, and multi-channel delivery that product teams wire up instead of building themselves. July was dense and unusually broad: a rebuilt Notion-style template editor, saved views and tags, schema management for how properties surface across the dashboard, passkey login, branch rebasing, and sandbox test runs that skip delay steps. Underneath the polish, two structural additions landed — message events syncing into the data warehouse, and a workflow step that pauses until an event arrives.
◆ Where it's heading
The developer-workflow half of the product is being treated like a codebase: branches that rebase onto main, tests that run in sandbox without delivering, tags and saved views for navigating a growing workspace. The engine half is moving in a different direction — toward workflows that hold state over time. A wait-for-event step, combined with the Clay data source triggering messaging as rows finish enriching, describes journeys rather than notifications. The analytics work is arriving twice over: raw events into the warehouse for teams with their own stack, and natural-language questions to the Knock agent for teams without one.
◆ Prediction
Wait-for-event is the primitive that makes journey-shaped use cases possible, so expect the next releases to address what it exposes — timeouts, observability into workflows sitting paused, and limits on how long one can wait before it becomes a support problem.
Alternatives to Windsurf and Knock
Other Infra & APIs products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Windsurf or Knock.
Statsig
Statsig is packaging its own workflows as skills for someone else's agent to run.
Rootly
Rootly's AI stops summarizing incidents and starts investigating them.
WorkOS
Auth infrastructure that agents can drive and developers can run locally.
Expo
Expo shut down its own coding agent and kept the MCP server — it wants to be the substrate.
Clerk
Clerk is building auth for machines: API keys, a CLI agents can drive, per-verification pricing.
See all Windsurf alternatives → · See all Knock alternatives →
Recent activity from Windsurf and Knock
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 23h agoKnockAnalytics in the Knock agent
- 1d agoKnockWait for event function ⚡
- 2d agoKnockClay data source
- 7d agoKnockRedesigned template editor
- 14d agoKnockBranch rebasing
- 16d agoKnockPasskey authentication
- 2mo agoWindsurfAgent Command Center (v2.2.17)
- 2mo agoWindsurfBug fixes and improvements (v2.2.17)
- 2mo agoWindsurfWindows updates (v2.2.17)
- 2mo agoWindsurfWindsurf 2.2.17: Devin Review & Quick Review
- 2mo agoWindsurfDevin Review & Quick Review (v2.2.17) ⚡
- 3mo agoWindsurfCascade crash and Devin Cloud auth failures fixed
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Windsurf and Knock?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Knock is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Windsurf better than Knock?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Knock is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Windsurf?
Top Windsurf alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Windsurf alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/windsurf for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Knock?
Top Knock alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Knock alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/knock for the full list with editorial commentary on each.