Head-to-head

Devin vs OpenHands

Both sell delegated coding, but one is a managed capacity product and the other is an open platform you have to operate yourself.

Last updated April 2026 · Pricing and features verified against official documentation

Devin and OpenHands overlap in the place that matters most for modern coding agents: they both aim to take real engineering work off a developer’s plate and return something reviewable. That makes the comparison useful for teams that have already decided they want delegated coding and are now deciding how much control they want over the stack.

Devin is the more managed product. Cognition has built it around task delegation, parallel sessions, reviewable output, and team control, so it behaves like machine capacity that a software org can schedule. OpenHands is the more open product. All Hands AI has built it around local runs, cloud access, an SDK, and model choice, so it behaves like a platform you can adapt and operate.

The choice is simple: buy Devin if you want the agent to feel like an engineering queue, and buy OpenHands if you want the agent to feel like infrastructure you can shape.

The Core Difference

Devin is a service for teams that want to hand off work and review the result. Its strength is that it turns coding into managed throughput.

OpenHands is a platform for teams that want control over where the work runs, which models it uses, and how much of the stack they own. Its strength is that it lets the buyer decide what kind of agent environment they are running.

That difference matters because the products fail in different ways. Devin is costly and can waste money when tasks are badly scoped. OpenHands is cheaper to start, but it asks the buyer to take responsibility for deployment, model choice, and data posture.

Workflow And Review

Devin wins. The product is built around autonomous task completion, Devin Review, draft PR support, code changes from chat, and commit-status visibility. That gives teams a clearer review loop and makes it easier to treat the agent as a worker that returns something inspectable rather than a chat interface that sometimes edits files.

OpenHands can absolutely do real coding work, but its workflow is broader and less opinionated. The platform spans local GUI, CLI, hosted cloud, and SDK-based automation, which is a strength for technical teams and a weakness for buyers who want a single, simple operating model. If the real goal is to push bounded tickets through review, Devin is the better product.

Control And Deployment

OpenHands wins. Local OpenHands is free, the cloud product can run with your own key, and the enterprise path adds self-hosted deployment, SAML/SSO, and a larger-codebase SDK. The point of the product is not just to do the work; it is to let the buyer decide where the work happens and how much of the environment stays under their control.

Devin is still a cloud-first product even when it gets more sophisticated. That is an advantage for teams that want less operational burden, but it is a real constraint if you need local experimentation, bring-your-own-model flexibility, or a deployment path that can live inside your own infrastructure. For platform teams, OpenHands is the more adaptable base.

Pricing

OpenHands wins on entry cost and evaluation flexibility. The local open-source version is free, the cloud Individual tier is free if you bring your own key, and only the enterprise path moves into custom pricing. That makes it easy to test the product seriously before committing to a paid deployment model.

Devin is priced like capacity software, not a casual assistant. Core starts at $20, but usage is metered in Agent Compute Units, Team jumps to $500 per month, and the real bill depends on how much work you ask it to do. That structure makes sense if you are buying throughput, but it is harder to treat as a low-risk experiment.

Privacy

Devin wins. Cognition says customer data is not used for training by default unless you opt in, and enterprise customers are not trained on at all under their agreements. The review also notes SOC 2 Type II and a more deliberate business privacy posture, which matters for a tool that needs access to repositories, tickets, and chat.

OpenHands is more permissive. Its privacy policy says All Hands AI may use content and feedback to train and tune its models, and the review notes that private feedback still helps improve the service. It also routes content through third-party AI providers under the company’s agreements. If the work is sensitive, Devin is the easier product to defend by default.

Who Should Pick Devin

• The engineering manager buying backlog reduction should pick Devin because it turns repetitive tickets into managed agent sessions instead of asking one developer to do everything manually.
• The platform or infrastructure team with disciplined review habits should pick Devin because the product is organized around pull requests, review loops, and parallel work.
• The organization that wants more throughput without redesigning its stack should pick Devin because it behaves like an additional capacity layer rather than a new system to operate.

Who Should Pick OpenHands

• The platform team building custom agent workflows should pick OpenHands because the SDK, API, and model-agnostic design make it easier to tailor the environment.
• The security-conscious organization should pick OpenHands if it needs local or self-hosted deployment and wants to keep more control over where code and data move.
• The technical buyer who wants to experiment before standardizing should pick OpenHands because the free local path and BYO-key cloud tier make it a lower-risk way to learn the workflow.

Bottom Line

Devin and OpenHands both aim at delegated coding, but they sell different kinds of confidence. Devin sells confidence that the work will be managed, reviewed, and returned in a form a team can supervise. OpenHands sells confidence that the buyer can decide how the agent runs, what it connects to, and how much of the stack stays under their control.

If you want a managed queue for engineering chores, pick Devin. If you want an open coding-agent platform you can run locally, connect to your own models, and evolve into a larger system, pick OpenHands. The right answer is the one that matches whether you are buying capacity or control.