Head to head · Company knowledge search · October 2026 research run
Cohere North vs Dust
Dust scores 62.8 (B) on agent readiness against Cohere North's 55.1 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Cohere North leads on schema & documentation. Both do company knowledge search.
Which one, for what
Good for Regulated companies that want an agent and search platform over their own documents, mail and tickets, run privately or air-gapped and called through a REST or OpenAI-compatible API.
Ahead on
- Schema & documentation, 85 against 75
Watch for
No public price, trial or self-serve signup. Access starts with a sales conversation
Dust B
Good for A team that already works in Dust and wants an outside agent to search its spaces, read documents and call its agents with a user's own access.
Ahead on
- Reliability, 53 against 37
- Payments & pricing, 20 against 0
- Maintenance & community, 86 against 78
Also in its favour
- A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
- Open source
- No incidents deducted, where Cohere North loses 4 points for them
Watch for
Programmatic usage has no free credits. It draws only on the workspace credit pool, which Free seats cannot use
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Cohere North | Dust | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 37 | 53 | Dust +16 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 85 | 75 | Cohere North +10 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 71 | 67 | Cohere North +4 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 77 | 75 | Cohere North +2 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 0 | 20 | Dust +20 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 78 | 86 | Dust +8 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 69 | 68 | Cohere North +1 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -4 | 0 | |
| Total | 55.1 · C | 62.8 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Cohere North | Dust |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Cohere Inc. | Permutation Labs |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | https://dust.tt/mcp |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary platform under Cohere's terms of use and customer agreements. The North MCP Python SDK on GitHub is MIT | MIT for the platform's source at github.com/dust-tt/dust. The hosted service is sold under Dust's own terms. The npm page gives ISC for @dust-tt/client and MIT for @dust-tt/dust-cli |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-01 | 2026-10-08 |
| Terms last updated | 2022-09-07 | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-05-01 | no date given |
| Customer content may train models | yes | |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | |
| Popularity | none | 1.5k stars, 17k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (2) | none |
Verdicts
Cohere North
North has a public OpenAPI 3.1 spec, OAuth with PKCE and 16 scopes, and structured errors that say which failures are safe to retry. Access is the main limitation. Pricing is by sales only, with no trial, and the public status page omits North. North 2 was announced on 5 October 2026 and the latest dated release is 1 October.
Dust
The whole platform is MIT on GitHub, with a public OpenAPI document of 68 operations, llms.txt and a remote MCP server that acts with the signed-in user's access. API calls that run agents draw only on a paid workspace credit pool, and the terms of service could not be read.
Before you call either
Cohere North
- Get the North host from your admin and call https://<host>/api. Cohere-hosted examples use north.cohere.com
- Request an OAuth token with only the scopes the task needs, such as chat_v2_ext, rather than a pasted developer token
- Retry only when is_retryable is true, waiting retry_after_seconds or Retry-After, with backoff capped near 60 seconds
- Strip raw_prompt and raw_generation from chat responses before keeping them in context
- Use /v1/responses to call North through the OpenAI SDK by changing the base URL and key
Dust
- Use
https://eu.dust.ttfor a workspace in the EU region andhttps://dust.ttotherwise, for both the API and the MCP server - Connect an MCP client by OAuth and send the
resourceparameter in authorisation and token requests. API keys do not work on the MCP server - Expect HTTP 429 with type
rate_limit_errorwhen the credit pool, the programmatic monthly cap or the key's spend cap is exhausted. Retrying will not help - Call
GET /api/v1/w/{wId}/searchwithlimit(1 to 100, default 25) andcursor, or a data source view's search withtop_k - Keep document upserts under 120 a minute per workspace
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Cohere North or Dust?
Dust scores 62.8 (B) on agent readiness against Cohere North's 55.1 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Cohere North leads on schema & documentation.
Do Cohere North and Dust need an API key?
Cohere North uses an OAuth sign-in. Dust takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.
Can an agent call Cohere North and Dust without installing anything?
No hosted endpoint is listed for Cohere North. Dust has a hosted endpoint at https://dust.tt/mcp.
Are Cohere North and Dust open source?
No open-source release is listed for Cohere North. Dust is open source (MIT for the platform's source at github.com/dust-tt/dust. The hosted service is sold under Dust's own terms. The npm page gives ISC for `@dust-tt/client` and MIT for `@dust-tt/dust-cli`).
Other comparisons with Cohere North or Dust
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/cohere-north-vs-dust.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/cohere-north.json·/api/v1/tools/dust.json - From a terminal
anchor compare cohere-north dust(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "cohere-north", "b": "dust"}at/mcp, no key