Factory vs GitHub Copilot (2026)

MCP connects Droid to the customer's own tools and data, and Connectors add third party apps with managed authentication and organization level controls. Delegations take work from Slack, Linear, Jira, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat with shared instructions, plugins, identity and compute, and automations act on GitHub events and inbound webhooks, with org policy deciding which models, tools and integrations Droid may use.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/harness/mcp, harness/connectors, delegations and enterprise/identity-and-access; docs.factory.com/delegations/indexread 2026-10-28

The cloud agent works natively across GitHub issues, pull requests and Actions, takes tasks from Slack, Teams, Jira, Linear and Azure Boards, and reaches further tools and data through MCP servers, with the GitHub and Playwright MCP servers on by default and enterprise policy restricting MCP servers.

Sourcedocs.github.com about-coding-agent and concepts/agents/enterprise-managementread 2026-09-29

Custom droids are subagents with their own system prompt, model and tool policy that Droid delegates focused tasks to in a fresh context window. Missions plan and run large multi feature projects: the customer approves a plan of features and milestones, and an orchestrator in Mission Control assigns the work to workers, validates milestones and runs headless through droid exec --mission. Worktrees keep parallel sessions apart.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/harness/subagents, missions/overview and missions/referenceread 2026-10-28

The cloud agent researches, plans and changes code on a branch in its own environment, custom agents configured with tailored prompts, tools and context handle specialized tasks at enterprise, organization and repository level, and third party coding agents (Claude, Codex) run alongside it under the same protections.

Sourcedocs.github.com about-coding-agent and concepts/agents/enterprise-managementread 2026-09-29

Automations start a Droid session on a schedule (plain words or cron), a Slack message, a GitHub event or an inbound webhook, running on a Droid Computer, an Environment, the desktop app or GitHub Actions. Incident Response sets Droid to respond to production alerts in Slack, Triage classifies inbound work and routes it, and Droid Exec publishes GitHub Actions workflows for PR review and weekly cron runs.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/software-factory/automations, incident-response, triage and droid-exec/overviewread 2026-10-28

An automation runs the cloud agent on a schedule or in response to events such as an issue being opened, with no person starting it; beyond that the agent is assigned issues, answers @copilot mentions in pull requests and takes tasks from Slack, Teams, Jira, Linear, Azure Boards, the agents panel and VS Code.

Sourcedocs.github.com about-coding-agentread 2026-09-29

AutoWiki generates structured wikis of each repository's architecture, modules, APIs and conventions. The /wiki command builds one from the Droid CLI, /install-wiki sets up a CI action that regenerates it on every push to the default branch, the Wiki Browser in the Factory App searches and manages wikis, and the AutoWiki API creates runs, browses pages, searches and exports.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/software-factory/wiki/overview, wiki/auto-refresh, wiki/web-viewer and api-reference/wikiread 2026-10-28

Each repository gets a semantic code search index that is kept current automatically, typically updated within seconds of a new conversation, and used by Copilot Chat on GitHub and in VS Code and by the cloud agent; MCP extends grounding to outside data and content exclusions bound what may be read.

Sourcedocs.github.com concepts/context/repository-indexingread 2026-09-29

Sessions are resumable across the app, CLI, web and mobile and drivable through the Sessions API, and AGENTS.md and hierarchical settings carry configuration across sessions. Session state stays within one session, AGENTS.md holds standing instructions, and the documentation index lists no memory layer of Factory's own.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/api-reference/sessions, harness/agents-md and llms.txtread 2026-10-28

Copilot Memory stores repository facts and user preferences that Copilot writes from users' work, scoped to the repository or the user, validated against the current branch before use, deleted after 28 days unused, and reviewable and deletable by repository owners and by organization or enterprise admins; the cloud agent, code review, the CLI and agentic autofix use it. Copilot Memory is in public preview on all paid plans.

Sourcedocs.github.com concepts/agents/copilot-memoryread 2026-09-29

Autonomy levels (Off, Low, Medium, High) decide what Droid may do without confirmation, and permission rules allow, require approval for, or block matching shell commands, with an ask rule requiring approval even at High autonomy. Missions start only after the customer approves the plan, org managed settings enforce these as hard policy, and OS level sandboxing and Droid Shield secret scanning sit beside them.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/autonomy-and-safety/permission-rules, auto-run and missions/planningread 2026-10-28

The cloud agent works on a branch and a person reviews the diff, iterates and decides when to create the pull request, which then passes GitHub's own branch protection and review controls; managed settings files control agent command authorization across Copilot clients, and enterprise policy decides where the agent may run at all.

Sourcedocs.github.com about-coding-agent and concepts/agents/enterprise-managementread 2026-09-29

Factory lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 with reports, architecture documents and subprocessor lists in its Trust Center at trust.factory.com, and offers SSO over SAML or OIDC, SCIM directory sync, organization roles flowing from the identity provider, service accounts with their own API keys and an organization audit log that records authentication, SSO and SCIM changes and policy changes.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/enterprise/compliance-audit-and-monitoring and enterprise/identity-and-accessread 2026-10-28

Enterprises set four agent policy states, including enabled for dynamic groups of organizations, manage custom agents at enterprise level through AI Controls or REST endpoints, restrict MCP servers and control plugin installs through managed settings. GitHub Copilot Business and Enterprise are covered by SOC 2 Type II reports available on the GitHub Enterprise Trust Center.

Sourcedocs.github.com concepts/agents/enterprise-management and github.blog/changelogread 2026-09-29

Droid exports OpenTelemetry to the customer's collector: each user turn produces a trace whose child spans are the model calls and tool runs, with droid.tool and droid.message spans when message content logging is on, plus tool, MCP and blocked command metrics tagged by session and user. An organization audit log records who did what, including who started a Droid session from a connected tool, and Factory Analytics reports usage, credits and tool use per session.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/enterprise/telemetry/data-reference, audit-log and compliance-audit-and-monitoringread 2026-10-28

The enterprise audit log records agent actions such as pull_request.create with actor_is_agent, the agent_session_id and the initiating user, filterable with actor:Copilot over 180 days and streamable to external destinations (public preview), and AI Controls lists and filters agent sessions across the enterprise. The audit log does not include client session data, so prompts sent locally are not captured and a custom hook is needed to log CLI events.

Sourcedocs.github.com agentic-audit-log-events and concepts/agents/enterprise-managementread 2026-09-29

Factory offers two deployment options. Factory Managed runs the control plane in Factory's cloud while Droid runs on developer machines, CI, machines the customer registers through Remote Control and Factory managed Droid Computers, with LLM traffic routed to the customer's own providers or gateways and a dedicated EU deployment (api.eu.factory.ai, EU session storage and EU only inference) for enterprise customers.

Factory Private, in private preview, runs Droid sandboxes inside the customer's own VPC through OpenCompute, a self hosted service that provisions sandboxes on Kubernetes, EC2 or Lambda microVMs on demand. A fully airgapped Custom Deployment uses in network model endpoints with no Factory cloud at runtime, and Enterprise adds data residency, dedicated compute and on premises options.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/enterprise/network-and-deployment, opencompute/overview, enterprise/airgapped-deployment and factory.com/pricingread 2026-10-28

Copilot with data residency is offered in the United States and the European Union: requests route to model endpoints in the enterprise's region, code, prompts and responses stay in region during inference, and Copilot logs and telemetry are stored in region.

Sourcedocs.github.com github-copilot-with-data-residencyread 2026-09-29

Plugins package skills, commands, custom droids, output styles, hooks and MCP servers, and Factory maintains an official marketplace at Factory-AI/factory-plugins naming droid-control (terminal, browser and computer automation for QA and demos), droid-evolved (skills for navigation, writing, design and frontend work) and security-engineer (security review, threat modeling and vulnerability validation). Organizations run internal approved marketplaces, and since 27 October admins pick plugins from their registered marketplaces.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/harness/plugins, enterprise/internal-plugin-marketplaces and changelog/release-notesread 2026-10-28

Copilot ships several agents that teams can adopt one at a time, the cloud agent, Copilot code review, agentic autofix and the Copilot CLI, and third party coding agents from Anthropic and OpenAI (Claude, Codex) can be used alongside it in public preview. Custom agents, skills and hooks let teams add their own.

Sourcedocs.github.com concepts/agents/copilot-memory, about-coding-agent and concepts/agents/enterprise-managementread 2026-09-29

The customer picks among Factory hosted models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI and Factory's own pool, lets the Factory Router choose per task, or brings its own OpenAI, Anthropic, open source or local models by key, and enterprise controls restrict which models, base URLs and providers a fleet may use.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/models and model-independence/byokread 2026-10-28

Paid users select among models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Moonshot AI and Microsoft, with an optional one million token context, or use auto model selection, and Business and Enterprise admins decide by policy which models are enabled; Free and Student plans get auto selection only.

Sourcedocs.github.com reference/ai-models/supported-modelsread 2026-09-29

A REST API at api.factory.ai with bearer API keys creates and drives Droid sessions, wiki runs, CI automations and readiness reports (the Sessions API is enabled for selected organizations), beside the Droid SDK and headless droid exec for scripts and CI.

Sourcedocs.factory.ai/api-reference/sessions and droid-exec/overviewread 2026-09-29

The Copilot SDK exposes the agent loop, custom agents and cloud and remote sessions with server to server tokens, and REST endpoints manage custom agents at enterprise level, beside MCP and the CLI.

Sourcedocs.github.com get-started/features and concepts/agents/enterprise-managementread 2026-09-29

The Agent Readiness model scores how ready the customer's repository is for agents, Agent Effectiveness measures throughput, output and spend across the organization, and code review, security review and Automated QA test the customer's code. Factory publishes its own benchmark results (Agent Arena, Legacy Bench, Terminal Bench). Factory does not describe a harness, scored test set or optimization loop for evaluating Droid's behavior on the customer's work.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/agent-readiness/overview, agent-effectiveness/overview and benchmarksread 2026-10-28

The cloud agent runs the project's tests, code review checks the customer's changes, admins can pilot a feature or model with a group of users, and agent sessions support troubleshooting. Those check the customer's code or trial adoption, and no tools for testing or scoring the agent's own behavior are described.

Sourcedocs.github.com get-started/features and about-coding-agentread 2026-09-29

Droid Control, an official Factory plugin, lets Droids launch and operate web apps and Electron apps through end to end flows. The Droid clicks, types and captures screenshots as QA and demo evidence, and Automated QA tests the application as a real user would with visual evidence. The CLI also ships an agent-browser skill for browser automation, the browser pane in Factory's desktop app takes Droid's clicks and keystrokes directly, and since 20 October the built in browser can import Chrome cookies on macOS so Droid stays signed in.

Sourcedocs.factory.com/software-factory/droid-control, automated-qa and changelog/release-notesread 2026-10-28

The Playwright MCP server is enabled by default for the cloud agent, so the agent drives a browser in its own environment to open, interact with and screenshot the web app it is building, with the browser supplied by GitHub. The browser steps themselves are not described in detail.

Sourcedocs.github.com about-coding-agentread 2026-09-29