Factory vs OpenHands
A side-by-side comparison of Factory and OpenHands, two Agent tools, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.
Compared from listings verified as of
At a glance
| Attribute | Factory | OpenHands |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Agent | Agent |
| Pricing (differs) | PAID | FREEMIUM |
| License (differs) | Proprietary | Open core |
| Deployment | Hybrid | Hybrid |
| Platforms | Web, CLI, API | Web, CLI, API |
| Model support (differs) | Multi-model | BYO key / model |
| Vendor (differs) | Factory | All Hands AI |
| Capabilities (differs) |
|
|
The honest brief
Factory
Model-agnostic 'Droids' run as both cloud and local background agents from one CLI — frontier or open-weight models.
- Droids plan, edit, and run tasks autonomously
- Runs agents in the background
- Works across a whole codebase
- CLI/SDK driven
- Paid-only, no free tier
- Enterprise-oriented onboarding
- Autonomy needs careful review on large repos
OpenHands
Leading open-source, self-hostable Devin-style SWE agent — read the code, swap any model, run your own sandbox.
- Browser, terminal, and editor in a sandbox
- Inspect and modify the full codebase
- Model-agnostic (Claude/GPT/Gemini/local)
- Active research community and benchmarks
- Setup heavier than hosted rivals
- Autonomy still hit-or-miss on complex tasks
- Sandbox infra adds compute cost
- Less polished than commercial peers
When to pick which
Both cover Autonomous coding agent, Code review, Multi-agent orchestration, and Browser automation.
Pick Factory if you need Terminal / CLI agent.
- Terminal / CLI agent (primary capability)
Pick OpenHands if you need Code generation.
- Code generation (primary capability)
Factory leans on Multi-agent orchestration as a headline capability; OpenHands treats it as secondary.
- Multi-agent orchestration (primary capability)
They also differ on:
- Pricing
- PAID · FREEMIUM
- License
- Proprietary · Open core
- Model support
- Multi-model · BYO key / model