A lift based Cycloidal Wave Energy Converter (CycWEC) was investigated using numerical simulations to estimate its mean annual power absorption. Based on the power absorption as well as size and weight estimates a number of performance measures were derived in order to compare this novel Wave Energy Converter (WEC) to other more established devices for which results have been published by Babarit et al. 1 using a similar benchmarking approach. Comparison of these measures with published data for eight more established WEC designs, including heaving buoy, oscillating water column and flap devices shows that the CycWEC performance in all metrics exceeds that of all other devices. Most importantly, the energy per mass of the CycWEC exceeds that of all other devices by more than an order of magnitude, indicating the potential of the CycWEC to significantly lower the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) and reducing it to a level where the CycWEC can compete with other renewable energy sources like solar and wind. •Benchmarking of the novel Cycloidal Wave Energy Converter (CycWEC).•The CycWEC performance exceeds that of all other traditional WECs in every metric.•More than an order of magnitude improvement in cost of energy.•The CycWEC is expected to be cost competitive with established renewables like wind.