Cognition vs Cosine (2026)

Native integrations cover GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Linear and PagerDuty, and MCP reaches hundreds of other tools and data sources.

Breadth across classes is met on the named set alone: source control, ticketing, database, design, payments and chat are six distinct classes.

Dynamic workflows are Python scripts that orchestrate a team of Devin agents in stages, in parallel on separate VMs, passing structured results between stages.

Swarm mode is a named orchestrator spawning specialized child agents that work in parallel, which is coordinated multi-agent work rather than merely parallel runs.

Automations fire on Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Linear, Jira, Pylon, PagerDuty, schedule and webhook events without anyone tagging Devin, and scheduled sessions add recurring work.

Work starts from three surfaces, the terminal CLI, Cosine Cloud and Desktop, each invoked by a person, with remote execution behind them. GitHub, Jira, Linear and Slack appear as MCP connections the agent calls rather than as channels that invoke it, and no IDE extension is documented. A documented ticket, webhook or scheduled trigger would move this to Full.

Devin indexes connected repositories into DeepWiki wikis with architecture diagrams and source links that Ask Devin searches for context.

Context is gathered on demand: Cosine loads relevant files and uses language server operations such as go to definition and find references, with MCP connections for outside systems. No persistent index or embeddings layer over the codebase is documented, which keeps this at Partial.

Knowledge that Devin suggests and users approve is scoped from one repository up to the enterprise and can be disabled, but no lifetime or purge path is documented.

The agent saves reusable facts with a save_memory tool into .cosine/agents.md, a project-scoped file that persists across sessions and loads at the start of each, beside the team's own AGENTS.md. What holds it at Partial: no lifetime, expiry or purge path is published.

Devin's proposed Knowledge is saved only after a user approves it, AI guardrails can block messages and PR comments before Devin acts, and security profiles apply reusable restrictions.

Manual mode, the default, asks for confirmation before every mutating action: edits, file operations, terminal commands and MCP tool calls. Plan mode is read-only until the user chooses how the plan is carried out, auto mode is an opt-in, and every turn is a git commit that can be reverted.

SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 are assessed annually by independent auditors, and Enterprise adds SAML and OIDC SSO, IdP group mapping and custom roles for fine grained RBAC.

Deployment posture is strong and first-party, and the customer base is highly regulated. What is missing is the other half: no trust center, certification page, attestation, SSO, RBAC or audit control appears anywhere in the site navigation, which for a vendor selling to HSBC, BAE Systems and Lloyds is more likely a disclosure gap than an absence. cosine.sh/air-gapped and cosine.sh/legal are the pages to read.

The session Progress tab shows shell commands, code edits and browser activity step by step after the fact, with Session Insights timelines and guardrail events in audit logs.

Checkpointing writes every agent turn into the customer's own git history, which looks like a strong audit trail, but the customer's own systems supply that record, so it does not count for Cosine. What Cosine supplies itself is live visibility, a todo list and a reviewable diff. No vendor-side execution trace, audit log or retained run history is documented.

Outposts run Devin sessions on the customer's own VMs, containers, Kubernetes clusters or on premises machines while inference stays in Devin's cloud, and Enterprise adds a Cognition hosted single tenant VPC over PrivateLink.

The grade does not depend on Lumen Sovereign, which Cosine labels Coming soon. Air-gapped is a shipped deployment tier with its own solutions page, independent of which model runs inside it.

The Devin official marketplace offers integration plugins bundling skills, rules, hooks, MCP servers and subagents that administrators install or require, alongside reusable playbooks.

Swarm mode's specialized subagents are chosen by the orchestrator rather than selected by the customer, so they are Cosine's own machinery, which is Partial. No catalog of prebuilt agents or templates a customer adopts is documented.

Users pick among Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cognition and open models by flag, command or config default, and Enterprise teams restrict which models are available.

A published menu of twenty-one models across eight providers, with per-model credit multipliers, is about as explicit as this axis gets.

The Devin API is documented across more than 300 reference pages, with an Outposts API and CLI reference and a CLI plugin format for programmatic control of sessions.

No API, SDK, headless mode or MCP server lets an outside caller drive Cosine; the docs name three surfaces, the CLI, Cloud and Desktop. MCP connections let Cosine reach the customer's tools, which is the other direction and counts toward integrations.

Devin tests its own changes, Devin Review checks pull requests and Session Insights reviews completed sessions, but no harness to evaluate agent behavior across a suite is documented.

Cosine publishes three internal benchmarks, Niche-Bench, Slop-Bench and Vibe-Bench, with comparative scores against GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Kimi K2.6. Those measure Cosine's own models rather than giving the customer something to test with, so they do not count here. The grade rests on the agent verifying its own work and on revertible commits.

Each session includes an interactive browser Devin operates for testing and visual verification, with screenshots and videos captured for the user.

Terminal execution, file editing and MCP tool access are all programmatic interfaces, which this axis excludes. The CLI product page, the model menu and the integrations section show no browser, screenshot or GUI automation capability.