Agentic Index
Cognition vs OpenHands (2026)
Devin and OpenHands answer the same question, an autonomous engineer that takes a ticket to a pull request, with opposite ownership models. Devin is Cognition's managed product with sub agent teams, Devin Desktop, and enterprise support. OpenHands, which began as OpenDevin, is MIT licensed and runs on your own hardware with any model, free apart from inference.
| At a glance | Cognition | OpenHands |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Coding agent | Coding agent |
| Entry price | Free · Pro $20/mo · Max $200/mo · Teams $80/mo + $40/seat · Enterprise custom | Free (OSS + Cloud Individual) · Enterprise custom |
| Free / trial | Free tier: light agent quota, limited model availability, unlimited inline edits and Tab completions. | OSS free + cloud individual tier |
| Pricing confidence | public exact | public partial |
| Feature | ||
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
|
Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
| Knowledge & context | ||
|
Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
Full / Explicit | Partial |
|
Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
Full / Explicit
Devin Desktop + Spaces (June 2026) enable shared context persistence across related agents and cloud sessions. |
Partial |
| Control & trust | ||
|
Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
Full / Explicit | Partial |
|
Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
|
Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
| Solution readiness | ||
|
Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
No / Not documented | Partial |
| Platform extensibility | ||
|
Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
No / Not documented | Full / Explicit |
|
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
Partial | Partial |
| Specialist automation | ||
|
Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Free · Pro $20/mo · Max $200/mo · Teams $80/mo + $40/seat · Enterprise custom | Free (OSS + Cloud Individual) · Enterprise custom |
|
Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public — exact | Public — partial |
|
Billing Primary billing axis |
quota + usage beyond quota | usage |
|
Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
High variable cost | Medium variable cost |
|
Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tierTrial
|
Free tier
|
|
Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Self-serve | Mixed |
Choose Cognition if
- You want a managed teammate with support, onboarding, and a polished command center, not infrastructure to operate.
- Sub agent parallelism on large migrations is the draw, proven on production scale case studies.
- Slack, Jira, and Linear are where your work arrives, and Devin picks it up there natively.
Choose OpenHands if
- You want the autonomous pattern on your own infrastructure, sandboxed in Docker, with full code ownership.
- Model freedom matters: point it at Claude, GPT, Gemini, or a local model and avoid lock in.
- The Agent Canvas control center can also run third party agents like Claude Code and Codex across your backends.