OpenHands vs Cursor, and Kortix, the open-source pick for the wider work

What OpenHands and Cursor each are

OpenHands is an open-source, self-hosted control center for coding agents and automations, from the OpenHands project (OpenHands on GitHub). OpenHands runs its own agent or a third-party agent such as Claude Code, Codex, Gemini or OpenCode, connects to the agent-server backends you point it at, and starts from a laptop, Docker, your own machine or a company server.

Cursor is a closed, hosted coding agent for building software (Cursor documentation). Cursor runs in an editor and a terminal, collaborates in Slack, and reviews pull requests in GitHub. Cursor's agents use their own computers to build, test and demo a change end to end, then hand it back for you to read.

The unit of work each one finishes

Both tools end in code, and both are built for engineers. OpenHands ends a conversation or an automation in a pull request, and Cursor ends a task in a reviewed change inside your repository. The reviewer is an engineer and the result is a diff, so the repository is where the work lands.

When Cursor is the right pick

Cursor fits a developer or a product team that wants an AI coding agent close to where they already work: the editor, the terminal, Slack and GitHub. Cursor's agents run in the background and return work for review, and Cursor's plans run from a free tier to paid tiers billed per month, with teams billed per seat (Cursor pricing, checked October 2026). If the job is shipping code and the reviewer is an engineer, Cursor is built for that job.

When OpenHands is the right pick

OpenHands fits an engineering team that wants to self-host the coding-agent harness and keep control of the machine the agent runs on. OpenHands' own repository warns that the agent server runs directly on the host you install it on, with access to that machine's filesystem and network, so the machine itself is the boundary (OpenHands on GitHub). OpenHands Cloud is the managed option for a team that would rather not run the backends itself (OpenHands docs).

Where a team outgrows a coding-agent harness

OpenHands and Cursor both stop at the code loop. When sales wants an agent to build an outbound sequence, finance wants the month closed, or support wants tickets triaged across a CRM, there is no pull request for a reviewer to read and no shared place for the instructions, the memory and the per-tool permissions that job needs. Teams reach this point when the same agents are asked to run from Slack, on a schedule, and across the apps the business already uses.

How Kortix covers the work beyond code

Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: agents, skills, company memory and connectors live in one git repo you own. A coding task is one use of Kortix; the same object also runs outbound, reconciliation and reporting, and sessions start from the web app, Slack, Microsoft Teams or the CLI.

One isolated sandbox per session. Each session has its own isolated machine and branch. Session work reaches main through a change request. Merge is default-deny for agents, so a person reads the result before it counts (Kortix docs).

How to choose

Three questions settle it. Does the work have to leave engineering? Is the person who reviews the result an engineer, or a teammate in another department? And does the whole system have to run on your own infrastructure, or is self-hosting the coding harness enough?

If every answer is about code, start with OpenHands or Cursor. If any answer is about the rest of the company, Kortix is the one to run. The Kortix vs OpenHands comparison works the same decision through against OpenHands, the OpenHands alternatives page covers the rest of the field, and the Kortix blog has Kortix's own write-up.