Cosine vs Factory (2026)

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

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.

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.

Automations start Droid on a schedule, a Slack message, a GitHub event or a webhook, and droid exec runs in GitHub Actions on cron.

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.

AutoWiki keeps a searchable wiki of each repository's architecture, modules and conventions, regenerated on every push.

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.

Sessions resume across app, CLI, web and mobile, but no memory layer with a stated scope and lifetime is documented.

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.

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.

SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 reports sit in the Trust Center, beside SSO, SCIM, three organization roles and an audit log.

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.

Each turn exports an OpenTelemetry trace of model calls and tool runs to the customer's collector, and an organization audit log records who did what.

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.

Cloud managed, hybrid and fully airgapped deployment patterns are documented, with an EU pattern and Enterprise data residency, dedicated compute and on premises options named.

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.

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

Customers pick among hosted models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI and Factory, let the Factory Router choose, or bring their own keys and local models under enterprise model policy.

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.

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.

Agent Readiness, review and QA automations test the customer's repository and code, but no harness evaluates Droid's own behavior.

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.

Droid Control, an official plugin, operates terminal CLIs, web apps and Electron apps with clicks, typing and screenshots, on runtime tools the customer installs.