Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run
Devin vs Emdash
Devin scores 57.3 (C) on agent readiness against Emdash's 53.9 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Emdash leads on reliability, payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do agent harnesses.
Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 1500 harnesses comparisons
Which one, for what
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
- Schema & documentation, 80 against 55
- Agent ergonomics, 62 against 55
- Security & auth, 72 against 38
- Transparency & trust, 75 against 54
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
Emdash D
Best for Developers who want parallel agents in worktrees, fed from their issue tracker, locally or over SSH.
Ahead on
- Reliability, 55 against 35
- Payments & pricing, 60 against 20
- Maintenance & community, 70 against 63
Also in its favour
- No key needed to call it
- Open source
Watch for
Telemetry on unless turned off in Settings or with TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false
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.
Payments & pricing Emdash +40
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 Plan prices are public, $20, $200 and $40 a seat with an $80 team minimum, but usage past the quota is billed at an unpublished rate (10).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).
Emdash 60
Free self-hosted software with nothing to buy, so 0 for a protocol and 20 each for public pricing, a free tier and onboarding with no sign-up, 60.
Security & auth Devin +34
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).
Emdash 38
Harness reading. Telemetry is described as optional and disabled in Settings or with TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false, which reads as on by default (15 of 30). Worktree per task and remote machines over SSH (10 of 20). No prompt-injection guidance (5). No audit log (5). No security policy file found (3). 15 + 10 + 5 + 5 + 3 = 38.
Schema & documentation Devin +25
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).
Emdash 55
Harness reading. Docs site and a workspace server package (55).
Transparency & trust Devin +21
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).
Emdash 54
Apache 2.0 (30). A telemetry page on the docs site (not read) (18 of 30). No deprecation policy (5). Disclosed with an opt-out (15 of 20). 30 + 18 + 5 + 15 = 68.
Reliability Emdash +20
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).
Emdash 55
Local software. Homebrew cask and installers for macOS, Windows and Linux (20). A code-consistency check and release workflows; no test workflow found (10). GitHub issues and pull requests weren't read (GitHub's pages refuse these sessions), so that line is scored absent (0). Stable tags to v1.2.11, release notes on GitHub (10). Version 1.2.11 (15). 20 + 10 + 0 + 10 + 15 = 55.
Agent ergonomics Devin +7
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).
Emdash 55
Harness reading. Issue intake from Linear, GitHub, Jira and others, diff review, pull requests and CI checks in one place, local or over SSH (55).
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Devin | Emdash | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 35 | 55 | Emdash +20 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 80 | 55 | Devin +25 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 62 | 55 | Devin +7 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 72 | 38 | Devin +34 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 20 | 60 | Emdash +40 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 63 | 70 | Emdash +7 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 75 | 54 | Devin +21 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 57.3/100 | D 53.9/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Devin | Emdash |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Vendor | Cognition AI, Inc. | General Action, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | https://mcp.devin.ai/mcp | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP | |
| Auth | API key | None |
| Pricing | Freemium | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Cognition's Platform Terms of Service | Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | 13 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-06 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-06-30 | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-03-09 | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | yes, with an opt-out | not read yet |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | not read yet |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | not read yet |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | not read yet |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | not read yet |
How the scores have moved
Emdash
No score change since it was listed.
Verdicts
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.
Emdash
A mature open-source app for parallel coding agents in Git worktrees, with issue intake from a dozen trackers and remote machines over SSH. Telemetry is on unless you turn it off, and no test workflow was found in the repository.
Before you call either
Devin
- Use a
cog_service-user key with the Member role. Legacyapk_keys fail against v3 and the MCP server with 401 or 403 - Set
max_acu_limiton every session you create. Usage is metered by the work done and has no published unit rate - Session creation is not idempotent in v3. After a timeout, list sessions by tag before creating again
- Enterprise keys and personal access tokens must send
X-Org-Idto the MCP server. Organisation-scoped keys resolve it automatically - Create scheduled work as an automation. POST to the schedules endpoint returns 403 for migrated organisations since 24 September 2026
Emdash
- Launch with TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false if you don't want telemetry
- Use the SSH mode to keep agents on a remote machine
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Devin or Emdash?
Devin scores 57.3 (C) on agent readiness against Emdash's 53.9 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Emdash leads on reliability, payments & pricing and maintenance & community.
Are Devin and Emdash open source?
No open-source release is listed for Devin. Emdash is open source (Apache-2.0).
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- Droid CLI vs Emdash
- Pi vs Emdash
- Emdash vs Gemini CLI
- Emdash vs GitHub Copilot CLI
- Emdash vs goose
- Emdash vs Harness²
- Emdash vs HarnessRouter
- Emdash vs Jules
- Emdash vs Junie CLI
- Emdash vs Kilo Code CLI
- Emdash vs Kimi Code CLI
- Emdash vs Kiro CLI
- Emdash vs Letta
- Emdash vs mini-swe-agent
- Emdash vs MiniMax Code
- Emdash vs Mistral Vibe CLI
- Emdash vs Muse Code
- Emdash vs OpenAI Agents API
- Emdash vs OpenAI Codex
- Emdash vs OpenCode
- Emdash vs OpenHands
- Emdash vs OpenMausBot
- Emdash vs Orca
- Emdash vs Paseo
- Emdash vs Prime Agent
- Emdash vs Qoder CLI
- Emdash vs Qwen Code
- Emdash vs Mirror CLI
- Emdash vs Rovo Dev CLI
- Emdash vs Sculptor
- Emdash vs T3 Code
- Emdash vs Traycer
- Emdash vs Unstoppable
- Emdash vs Verdent
- Emdash vs Vibe-Trading
- Emdash vs Warp (Warp Agent CLI and the Oz Agent API)
- Clawboo vs Devin
- Clawboo vs Emdash
- CLI Manager vs Devin
- CLI Manager vs Emdash
- Devin vs Harness
- Devin vs Paperclip
- Devin vs Parallax
- Emdash vs Harness
- Emdash vs Paperclip
- Emdash vs Parallax
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/devin-vs-emdash.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/devin.json·/api/v1/tools/emdash.json - From a terminal
anchor compare devin emdash(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "devin", "b": "emdash"}at/mcp, no key