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. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
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.
On the Agentic Index coding agent ranking, neither Cognition nor OpenHands clears the bar, which asks for all five merge loop capabilities documented in full. Cognition does not document testing, debugging and optimization in full; OpenHands does not document knowledge grounding and RAG in full. 2 of the 65 vendors in the lane clear it. See the coding agent ranking
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Cognition and OpenHands are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 956 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
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.
| 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 | C Cognition |
O OpenHands |
|---|---|---|
| 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
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. |
Full / Explicit |
|
Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
Full / Explicit
Dynamic workflows are Python scripts that orchestrate a team of Devin agents in stages, in parallel on separate VMs, passing structured results between stages. |
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
Automations fire on Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Linear, Jira, Pylon, PagerDuty, schedule and webhook events without anyone tagging Devin, and scheduled sessions add recurring work. |
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
Devin indexes connected repositories into DeepWiki wikis with architecture diagrams and source links that Ask Devin searches for context. |
Partial
Grounding comes from reading the repository directly, browsing the web and reaching outside sources through MCP, with repository roles and Persistent Agent Memory, and no codebase indexing or retrieval layer is documented. |
|
Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
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. |
Full / Explicit
Persistent Memory is an opt-in store the agent maintains itself in user and project tiers, pruning stale entries under a size cap, in plain Markdown files people can review, edit or delete. |
| Control & trust | ||
|
Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
Full / Explicit
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. |
Full / Explicit
The SDK's confirmation policy gates actions before they run, with AlwaysConfirm, a risk-rated ConfirmRisky setting and NeverConfirm, and a rejected action goes back to the agent with feedback. |
|
Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
Full / Explicit
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. |
Full / Explicit
Enterprise documents SAML and SSO, RBAC and fine-grained access control through the Agent Control Plane, but no attestation is confirmed because the linked Vanta trust center could not be read. |
|
Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
Full / Explicit
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. |
Full / Explicit
Built-in OpenTelemetry tracing records each agent step and tool call and exports to any OTLP backend the customer runs, and Enterprise sends conversation traces to the customer's own platform and lists audit logs for every agent action. |
|
Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
Full / Explicit
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. |
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. |
Full / Explicit
The Devin official marketplace offers integration plugins bundling skills, rules, hooks, MCP servers and subagents that administrators install or require, alongside reusable playbooks. |
Full / Explicit
Pre-built automations have their own documentation page and are the recommended onboarding step, including a Slack channel monitor and a GitHub PR review assistant, alongside documented workflow patterns and a skills system. |
| 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. |
Full / Explicit
Users pick among Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cognition and open models by flag, command or config default, and Enterprise teams restrict which models are available. |
Full / Explicit |
|
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
Full / Explicit
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. |
Full / Explicit |
|
Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
Partial
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. |
Full / Explicit
A documented Evaluation Harness guide shows customers how to run their own benchmark in the framework, and a separate benchmarks repository provides swebench-infer and swebench-eval pipelines with custom datasets, though it is mid-migration from V0 to the V1 Agent SDK. |
| Specialist automation | ||
|
Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
Full / Explicit
Each session includes an interactive browser Devin operates for testing and visual verification, with screenshots and videos captured for the user. |
Full / Explicit |
Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | C Cognition |
O OpenHands |
|---|---|---|
|
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 |
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