# Devin vs Emdash (slim)

> Devin scores 57.3 (C) to Emdash's 53.9 (D) for agent harnesses. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/devin-vs-emdash.md (~5,700 tokens) · this version ~2,330 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/devin-vs-emdash.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/devin-vs-emdash
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
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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.

- Devin: C 57.3, rank #797 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/devin.min.md
- Emdash: D 53.9, rank #927 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/emdash.min.md
- Devin, good 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 A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.
- Emdash, good 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 No key needed to call it; Open source.

| Category | Devin | Emdash |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 35 | 55 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 80 | 55 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 62 | 55 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 72 | 38 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 20 | 60 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 63 | 70 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 75 | 54 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Devin | Emdash |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 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 |
| 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 |

Why the edge:
- 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).)