Comparison · sources dated below
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 an open-source (AGPL-3.0), 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.
PRICE MODELS
The plans are shaped differently: Orbi can be self-hosted for free under AGPL-3.0, or run as Cloud on a Solo or Pro plan, each starting with a free trial of 3 merged deliveries. Devin lists subscription plans and usage priced by message; the figures below are a dated snapshot.
| Plan | Orbi | Devin |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Self-hosted: $0 under AGPL-3.0, with optional SUL terms; bring your model key. Cloud trial: 3 merged deliveries. | $0 with light quota. |
| Individual | Cloud Solo: US$29/month, 400M tokens, 1 repository. | Pro: $20/month. |
| Team / scale | Cloud Pro: US$79/month, 1.2B tokens, 5 repositories. | Max: $200/month; Teams: $80/month plus $40/month per full seat; Enterprise: contact sales. |
| Meter | Self-hosted uses your hardware and model provider. Cloud deliveries pause when the included allowance runs out; there is no per-token overage. | “Cost per message varies based on the model used, the task size and complexity, and the reasoning required.” |
Devin prices and billing wording: official Devin pricing, fetched 2026-09-24; the page also lists a “Dedicated deployment option” for Enterprise. Orbi Cloud prices and allowances: Orbi Cloud pricing.
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, provider terms vary; 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 | Open source (AGPL-3.0) — 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.
DEVIN VS CLAUDE CODE
One is a managed agent you hand a task to; the other is a coding agent you drive. Devin is Cognition's autonomous engineer: you delegate from chat or the web, it works in Cognition's cloud on Cognition's in-house models, and you pay a plan quota plus on-demand credits — the ACU unit survives only in enterprise order forms, as the billing section above shows. Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool: it reads your codebase, edits files and runs commands on your own surfaces, and you pay Anthropic by API token consumption or through a Claude subscription. Pick Devin when you want the machine, the models and the meter to be the vendor's problem; pick Claude Code when you want the session on your own surfaces, billed through your existing Anthropic subscription or API key. Most Devin AI vs Claude Code decisions start from what you already pay for: an Anthropic plan or API key in hand, against a Devin plan whose quota and credits you have to estimate before the work starts. Neither one carries the task past the pull request by itself, so the finish on both is yours to operate.
| Dimension | Devin | Claude Code |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A managed autonomous agent — delegate a task and it plans, codes and tests in Cognition's cloud, then returns pull requests. | Anthropic's coding agent you drive in your terminal, with IDE, desktop and web surfaces documented too. |
| Where the work runs | Cognition's cloud workspace, on Cognition's models; no bring-your-own-key option. | Your own machine on the terminal, IDE and desktop surfaces; the GitHub Actions path runs on GitHub's infrastructure. |
| How a task starts | A Slack or Teams tag, the web app, Linear/Jira, or a CLI handoff. | You start the session, or wire it into GitHub Actions to turn Issues into pull requests. |
| How you pay | Plan quota first, then on-demand credits that roll over; ACUs only under enterprise contracts. | API token consumption, or a Claude Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise subscription with usage included. |
Sources: cognition.com and docs.devin.ai (managed cloud, in-house models); Devin — self-serve plans and usage metering (quota, credits, enterprise ACUs) — verified 2026-09-07. Claude Code: overview and costs — verified 2026-10-08.
Want the Devin shape — a task that runs itself to a pull request and on to a merged, tagged release — while keeping Claude Code as the agent? Wrap it in Orbi. Orbi is open source (AGPL-3.0), defaults to Pi, and can drive Claude Code through an adapter, with the adapter's caveat written down in the Pi coding agent guide. Orbi claims an ai-ready Issue, runs the coding session, reviews the frozen head, merges it and publishes the tag; the boundary it adds is compared against Claude Code on its own in Orbi vs Claude Code. The same delivery line runs Orbi's own repository, and the record is public: Issue #852 was claimed, planned and tested by the runner, PR #854 merged with no human review, and the fix shipped in release v0.5.5.
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.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Yes. Orbi is available under AGPL-3.0, and it is designed for self-hosted GitHub delivery from Issue to reviewed pull request and release.
Yes. You can self-host Orbi on your own machine with your own model key. Orbi Cloud is the hosted option when you want Orbi to run the delivery line for you.
Self-hosted Orbi is free under AGPL-3.0, with your hardware and model provider as your costs. Orbi Cloud has two paid plans, Solo and Pro, each starting with a trial of 3 successful merged deliveries; Devin lists subscription plans and message-based usage pricing. See the cost comparison and the dated price table.
Orbi can merge a delivery's pull request only after an independent review, passing CI, and an exact reviewed head check. Read how Orbi auto-merges AI pull requests safely.
PROVENANCE
Every factual claim on this page maps to a dated source below. The product and documentation sources were checked on 2026-09-07; Devin's pricing page was fetched on 2026-09-24; Claude Code's overview and cost pages were checked on 2026-10-08. This page is a snapshot, so re-check the sources before you bet architecture on them.
OPEN SOURCE (AGPL-3.0) 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.
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