Comparison · facts verified 2026-09-07
Hire an engineer, or run a delivery line. Devin is Cognition's managed autonomous engineer: you delegate from Slack or the web, it works in Cognition's cloud, and it returns pull requests. Orbi is a self-hosted delivery system: your machine, your model keys, your GitHub queue. Both end in a reviewed PR — the real comparison is who owns the machine, the model, and the meter. Every claim below carries a source.
THE COMPETITOR, FROM ITS OWN MATERIALS
Devin is a commercial autonomous software-engineering agent from Cognition, which operates it as "the first autonomous software engineer" — an agent that "plans, writes, tests, and ships production code on its own." You assign work the way you'd ping a teammate: tag Devin on a Slack or Teams thread, delegate a bigger task from the web app, or hand it Linear/Jira tickets. A CLI exists for local quick fixes, and longer tasks hand off to cloud Devin. Each session runs in Devin's own cloud workspace — a shell, an editor, a browser — and is described as running "from prompt to PR." It is a serious managed product, deployed at large institutions (Mercedes-Benz, Goldman Sachs, and Anduril are among the named customers), with enterprise procurement, SSO, and usage governance on offer. The models and the infrastructure are Cognition's — the company builds its own SWE model line in-house — and no plan or documentation offers a bring-your-own-key option.
Sources: cognition.com (product description, in-house SWE models, customers); docs.devin.ai (task entry, workspace, prompt-to-PR) — verified 2026-09-07.
WHY THIS COMPARISON HAS A METER
Devin's pricing is not a number, it is a structure — and the structure has already been replaced once while customers were on it. That history is the part worth reading before you commit code delivery to a meter. The eras below carry no dates because Cognition's docs don't date them; the wording is quoted from those docs.
Self-serve plans paid a subscription plus consumption in Agent Compute Units (ACUs). The unit still exists in enterprise contracts: customers "consume Agent Compute Units (ACUs) against the volume in their order form."
Source: docs.devin.ai — usage metering — verified 2026-09-07.
Self-serve billing was restructured to a quota-plus-credits model: "Legacy Core plan users have been migrated to the Free plan," and today's on-demand credits are "the same dollar value as the ACUs you're used to." Nobody outside Cognition decided that.
Source: docs.devin.ai — self-serve plans — verified 2026-09-07.
Free, Pro at $20/month, Max at $200/month, Teams from $80/month ($40 per full seat). The plan quota covers sessions; on-demand credits "fund any work past your plan's included quota," roll over month to month, and never expire once purchased. When the allowance is used up, "Automations stop running and Devin Review switches to its smart diff viewer." Usage is metered on the work Devin performs — the number and complexity of actions, machine time, networking — which the docs themselves manage with per-member caps and a coach that flags inefficient prompts.
Sources: docs.devin.ai — self-serve plans; usage metering — prices are the docs' figures as of 2026-09-07.
A meter that reads work you cannot fully predict, priced in a structure the vendor can rewrite — it already has been rewritten once. Predictable cost is cost whose unit you control: your machine, your model, your meter.
DIFFERENCES THAT DECIDE THE CHOICE
The overlap is real: both take a delegated task and return a reviewed pull request. The differences are about where the code runs, who owns the model, what the work costs, and what you can verify.
| Dimension | Orbi | Devin |
|---|---|---|
| Task entry | GitHub Issue + ai-ready label — the repository is the queue |
Slack or Teams tag, web app, Linear/Jira, CLI handoff, API |
| Models | BYOK — any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, free tiers included; switching is a config change | Cognition's in-house SWE models on Cognition's infrastructure; no bring-your-own-key option |
| Runs where | Your machine — code and keys never leave it | Cognition's cloud workspace |
| Cost | Your hardware + your model; no per-task meter, self-hosting free forever | Subscription + quota, then on-demand credits (Pro $20/month, Teams from $80/month at verification) |
| Auditability | Fair-code open source — the whole delivery chain is readable | Closed source — you audit the vendor's promises, not the code |
Orbi column per docs.orbi.build and the orbi-build/orbi repository; Devin column per cognition.com and docs.devin.ai (billing pages) — verified 2026-09-07.
AN HONEST READ
Both deliver reviewed PRs from delegated tasks. The choice is what you are buying: someone else's engineer as a service, or a production line you own.
PROVENANCE
Every factual claim on this page maps to one of these. All were checked on 2026-09-07; this page is a snapshot, so re-check the sources before you bet architecture on them. One caveat we state openly: devin.ai's own pricing page was not directly reachable at verification time (it sat behind an access wall), so the billing facts above come from Devin's official documentation instead.
OPEN SOURCE CORE
Pick by what you're delegating: an engineer you rent in the vendor's cloud, or a production line you run in your own repository. If it's the second, Orbi is free to self-host — label an Issue ai-ready and keep the keys.
