OpenHands vs Devin, and Kortix, the open-source option a company owns

What OpenHands and Devin each are

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

Devin is a closed, hosted AI software engineer from Cognition (Devin documentation). Devin takes a task in plain language, works in its own cloud workspace with a shell, an editor and a browser, and returns a pull request. Devin's own docs size it plainly: if a person can do a task in three hours, Devin can most likely do it.

The unit of work each one finishes

Both tools end in a pull request, and both are built for engineering work. OpenHands ends a conversation or an automation in a change to a repository. Devin ends a delegated ticket in a draft pull request a person reviews. The reviewer is an engineer and the result is a diff, so the result lands in git.

When Devin is the right pick

Devin fits a team that wants to delegate a backlog and check the result later. Devin splits a large task across parallel cloud agents and reports back, and it keeps working while your laptop is closed (Devin plans and pricing). Devin's plans run from a free tier to Pro at $20 a month, a Team plan from $80 a month, and an Enterprise option (checked October 2026). If the work is engineering tickets, migrations and repetitive pull requests, Devin is built for that shape.

When OpenHands is the right pick

OpenHands fits a team that wants to self-host the coding-agent harness and keep control of the machine. 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

OpenHands and Devin both stop at engineering. Devin returns a pull request; a month-end close, an outbound sequence or support triage across a CRM is not a pull request, and there is no shared place for the instructions, the memory and the per-tool permissions that work needs. The decision changes when the same team asks for those agents to run from Slack, on a schedule, and reach the apps the rest of the company uses.

How Kortix covers the wider work

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 it. The same object runs the books, the campaign and the support queue, and reaches the tools those teams use: 3,000+ apps in a click, plus MCP, OpenAPI, Postman, GraphQL and raw HTTP.

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). Self-host is free, so the platform can run on your own network.

How to choose

Three questions settle it. Does the work have to leave engineering? Is the result a diff an engineer reads, or a deliverable another department reads? 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 Devin. If any answer is about the rest of the company, Kortix is the one to run. The Kortix vs OpenHands comparison takes the same decision against OpenHands, the OpenHands alternatives page covers the rest of the field, and Kortix's own account of the choice is on the Kortix blog.