Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

Conductor vs Devin

Devin scores 57.3 (C) on agent readiness against Conductor's 41.3 (E), and leads in every scored category. Both do agent harnesses.

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Which one, for what

Conductor E

Best for Existing Conductor users planning their move before Cloud closes on 20 November 2026 and the local app winds down in early 2027.

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

No new downloads or sign-ups since 4 November 2026

Devin C

Best for A team that wants to hand whole tasks to a cloud agent and collect pull requests, driven from a pipeline or another agent.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 35 against 25
  • Schema & documentation, 80 against 60
  • Agent ergonomics, 62 against 55
  • Security & auth, 72 against 45
  • Payments & pricing, 20 against 0
  • Maintenance & community, 63 against 58
  • Transparency & trust, 75 against 53

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install

Watch for

www.devinstatus.com lists two outages on 13 August and the web app down for about two hours on 24 September 2026

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Security & auth Devin +27

Conductor 45

Closed app. Telemetry and data handling weren't read beyond the transition notice (10 of 30). A security and permissions page (10 of 20). No prompt-injection guidance found (5). No audit log found (5). SOC 2 Type II report at trust.conductor.build (15 of 20). 10 + 10 + 5 + 5 + 15 = 45.

Devin 72

Hosted reading. Service-user keys with roles and named permissions per endpoint, revocable, with rotation endpoints in beta for Enterprise and expiring personal tokens. Custom roles are an Enterprise option, and Teams has Admin and Member only (25). Security profiles restrict network, MCP servers, git and the Devin MCP to read-only, and read-only API permissions exist. They are opt-in, and session creation accepts bypass_approval (16). AI Guardrails screen user messages and pull request comments for prompt injection, on Enterprise only, and they don't cover web pages or repository content Devin reads (8). Audit logs through the API need an enterprise-level permission. Session events and insights are available on all plans (10). SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001:2022, a disclosure address at security@cognition.ai, no security.txt, and the trust centre answers No to having a bug bounty (13).

Transparency & trust Devin +22

Conductor 53

Closed service with terms and privacy pages (15). The transition notice says when Cloud data deletion begins (20 November) and that all user data is deleted when the app shuts down in early 2027 (20 of 30). Dated shutdown notice (15 of 20). SOC 2 report on a trust portal, subprocessors not read (10 of 20). 15 + 20 + 15 + 10 = 60.

Devin 75

Editorial half. Closed source with clear terms from Cognition AI, Inc. (15). Terms (30 June 2026), privacy policy, security page and data processing agreement agree with each other. Customer data may be used for model training by default on self-serve plans, with an opt-out on paid plans that also turns on zero data retention at model providers, and Enterprise data isn't trained on without written consent. Retention is stated as the length of the customer relationship, with no periods (18). The API versioning policy on the release notes page says breaking changes are announced at least 7 days in advance and a deprecated endpoint stays available through a deprecation period. Dated notices followed it for the schedules endpoints (announced 10 September, creation refused from 24 September 2026), and others cover the v2 clone endpoint and Playbooks moving to Skills (23 October). v1 and v2 are marked legacy with no end date (20). Sub-processors listed with purpose and country, and 15 days' notice of additions, per the 8 October check (18).

Schema & documentation Devin +20

Conductor 60

Harness reading. Docs for workspaces, review and merge, a Conductor API reference page linked from the docs (not read), and security and permissions pages (60).

Devin 80

API reading. Public OpenAPI 3.1 spec for v3 with 182 paths and 274 operations on 4 November 2026, and separate v1 and v2 specs (25). llms.txt with 393 lines and a Markdown twin of every page (10). Each endpoint page names its required permission, but 63 of 274 operations have no description and the MCP tool descriptions are one line each (10). Enums on fields such as devin_mode, origin and category, with most strings unconstrained and nullable (9). curl examples in the quick starts, and 401, 403, 404, 409, 422 and 429 declared on all 274 operations, without a catalogue of error_code values (11). Versioned paths (v1, v2, v3, v3beta1) and an API release notes page dated by month, newest November 2026 (15).

Payments & pricing Devin +20

Conductor 0

No new sign-ups since 4 November, free users can't upgrade, and no price is shown. No protocol, no published price, no open free tier, no onboarding (0).

Devin 20

Published rubric. No payment protocol (0). Plan prices are public, $20, $200 and $40 a seat with an $80 team minimum, but usage past the quota is billed at an unpublished rate (10). A Free plan exists. The pricing page lists cloud agents from Pro upward, and we couldn't confirm API use on Free or whether a card is needed (10). A person signs up in a browser and provisions the service user in settings (0).

Reliability Devin +10

Conductor 25

Read as local software that is winding down. Installed from Conductor's own download, which stopped taking new users on 4 November 2026 (10). Closed source, so no public CI or issue tracker (0, 0). A dated changelog, newest 0.93.0 on 4 November (15). Version 0.93 (0). 10 + 0 + 0 + 15 + 0 = 25.

Devin 35

Hosted reading. Status page at www.devinstatus.com (Atlassian Statuspage) with 14 components, among them Cloud Agent and Cloud Web Client, read from the page itself on 4 November 2026 (20). Its history feed for the 90 days from 6 August 2026 lists Devin unavailable on 13 August (20 minutes), Devin Cloud unavailable on 13 August (2 hours 40 minutes) and the web app down on 24 September (about 2 hours), with minor session and Ask Devin incidents on 10 and 11 August, 3 and 17 September and 26 October. Both 13 August entries report the service unavailable. The 24 September entry names only the web app, not the API or the MCP server, so it is read as partial, as dashboard outages are on other listings. Two majors (5). Two scheduled maintenance entries (7 and 17 August) are read as maintenance. 429 is a documented response, but no rate limit figures were found (0). No Retry-After or backoff guidance found, and v3 session creation has no idempotency key (0). The platform terms give no guarantee of availability, and enterprise terms weren't read (0). The v3 API is the current, recommended surface, with 27 of 274 operations under /v3beta1 (10).

Agent ergonomics Devin +7

Conductor 55

Harness reading. Each task gets a workspace, branch, terminal and diff, with pull requests and merges from the app, and an API for integrations; not re-read in detail (55).

Devin 62

API and MCP reading. The MCP server documents 13 tools, several of them consolidated manage tools, and list endpoints take first to size a page (17). Cursor pagination on every v3 list endpoint and filters on session search by tag, playbook, origin, user and time (18). problem+json with error_code, field-level errors on 422 and a 400 that lists valid platform names, but no published code list (15). No idempotency key on v3 session creation. max_acu_limit caps what a session can spend, and the MCP tool annotations couldn't be read without a key (4). Only prompt is required to start a session. No official SDK found, only a Terraform provider (8).

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runConductorDevinEdge
Reliability16%202535Devin +10
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26080Devin +20
Agent ergonomics13%16.25562Devin +7
Security & auth14%17.54572Devin +27
Payments & pricing10%12.5020Devin +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.85863Devin +5
Transparency & trust7%8.85375Devin +22
Negative events≤1500
TotalE 41.3/100C 57.3/100

Facts side by side

FactConductorDevin
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorConductor (joining Meta)Cognition AI, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://mcp.devin.ai/mcp
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingPaidFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary. A closed-source Mac app and hosted Conductor Cloud under Conductor's termsProprietary service under Cognition's Platform Terms of Service
Tools exposednone13
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-11-042026-11-02
Terms last updatednot read yet2026-06-30
Privacy policy last updatednot read yet2026-03-09
Customer content may train modelsnot read yetyes, with an opt-out
Terms restrict automated accessnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot read yetyes
Terms or service can change without noticenot read yetnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot read yetyes

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

Conductor

Conductor ran parallel coding agents on the Mac, and Meta is acquiring it. It has taken no new users since 4 November 2026, Cloud turns read-only on 13 November and shuts down on 20 November, and the local app winds down in early 2027, when all user data is deleted.

Devin

The v3 API is well specified, with a public OpenAPI 3.1 file covering 274 operations, problem+json errors, cursor pagination and service-user keys tied to roles. The status page records two outages on 13 August and a two-hour web app outage on 24 September 2026, and no rate limit figures or retry guidance were found in the reviewed documentation.

Before you call either

Conductor

  1. Export your data from Settings, Account, Export data before 20 November 2026
  2. Move Cloud workspaces to your Mac with Transfer to local before 13 November
  3. Plan a move off the local app before early 2027; see the agent-harnesses category for alternatives

Devin

  1. Use a cog_ service-user key with the Member role. Legacy apk_ keys fail against v3 and the MCP server with 401 or 403
  2. Set max_acu_limit on every session you create. Usage is metered by the work done and has no published unit rate
  3. Session creation is not idempotent in v3. After a timeout, list sessions by tag before creating again
  4. Enterprise keys and personal access tokens must send X-Org-Id to the MCP server. Organisation-scoped keys resolve it automatically
  5. Create scheduled work as an automation. POST to the schedules endpoint returns 403 for migrated organisations since 24 September 2026

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Conductor or Devin?

Devin scores 57.3 (C) on agent readiness against Conductor's 41.3 (E), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with Conductor or Devin

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