Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

Devin vs Orca

Orca and Devin score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 57.4 (C) and 57.3 (C). Devin leads on schema & documentation, security & auth and transparency & trust. 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 65
  • Security & auth, 72 against 43
  • 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

Orca C

Best for Developers who want an orchestrator agent to split work across parallel coding agents, on desktop or mobile.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 58 against 35
  • Agent ergonomics, 70 against 62
  • Payments & pricing, 40 against 20
  • Maintenance & community, 75 against 63

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Open source

Watch for

Anonymous usage data collected by default, with an opt-out

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 +29

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).

Orca 43

Harness reading. Anonymous usage data with an opt-out, per the README's link to its telemetry docs (15 of 30). Worktrees per agent and a sandboxed Linux build (12 of 20). No prompt-injection guidance (5). No audit log (5). A dependency-security workflow (6 of 20). 15 + 12 + 5 + 5 + 6 = 43.

Reliability Orca +23

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).

Orca 58

Local software. Desktop and mobile builds and a Homebrew cask (20). Unit, end-to-end and platform test workflows; pass state not read (15). GitHub issues and pull requests weren't read (GitHub's pages refuse these sessions), so that line is scored absent (0). Tags to v1.4.251, no changelog file (8). Version 1.4 (15). 20 + 15 + 0 + 8 + 15 = 58.

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).

Orca 54

MIT (30). Privacy and telemetry docs on the site (not read) (18 of 30). No deprecation policy (5). Disclosed with an opt-out (15 of 20). 30 + 18 + 5 + 15 = 68.

Payments & pricing Orca +20

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).

Orca 40

Scored on the cloud option. No protocol (0). The cloud price wasn't found on the pages read (0). The desktop app is free and MIT with no card (20). The local app needs no sign-up that we found (20). 0 + 0 + 20 + 20 = 40.

Schema & documentation Devin +15

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).

Orca 65

Harness reading. A docs site with CLI orchestration and native chat pages (65).

Maintenance & community Orca +12

Devin 63

Closed service. Newest release note dated 2 November 2026 (30). Thirty dated release notes between 7 August and 2 November 2026, and API notes for August, September, October and November (20). Public release notes and a support address, with no public tracker or forum found (10). No official SDK for the Devin API found (a Python SDK in the federal docs covers analytics and ACU limits for air-gapped Desktop), and the Devin MCP server didn't appear in the official MCP registry per the 8 October check (0). No public CI or packages to assess, with the docs and three OpenAPI specs kept current (3).

Orca 75

Tags to v1.4.251 and commits on 6 November 2026 (30). Many releases in 90 days (20). GitHub issues and pull requests weren't read (GitHub's pages refuse these sessions), so that line is scored absent (0). Current builds (15). Extensive CI (10). 30 + 20 + 0 + 15 + 10 = 75.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDevinOrcaEdge
Reliability16%203558Orca +23
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28065Devin +15
Agent ergonomics13%16.26270Orca +8
Security & auth14%17.57243Devin +29
Payments & pricing10%12.52040Orca +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.86375Orca +12
Transparency & trust7%8.87554Devin +21
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 57.3/100C 57.4/100

Facts side by side

FactDevinOrca
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorCognition AI, Inc.Lovecast Inc.
Hosted endpointhttps://mcp.devin.ai/mcpno (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthAPI keyNone
PricingFreemiumFree
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Cognition's Platform Terms of ServiceMIT
Tools exposed13none
Read-only variant documentedyesno
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-11-022026-11-06
Terms last updated2026-06-30no document linked
Privacy policy last updated2026-03-09no document linked
Customer content may train modelsyes, with an opt-outnot read yet
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textnot read yet
Terms restrict benchmarkingyesnot read yet
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the textnot read yet
Arbitration or class-action waiveryesnot read yet

How the scores have moved

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.

Orca

An open-source orchestrator for coding agents with worker agents in their own worktrees, chat and terminal views, a browser and a CLI, on desktop and mobile, with heavy test automation. It collects anonymous usage data by default, and the cloud option's pricing wasn't found.

Before you call either

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

Orca

  1. See the telemetry docs on onorca.dev to opt out of anonymous usage data
  2. Use the orchestration CLI to hand a large task to one agent that starts workers

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Devin or Orca?

Orca and Devin score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 57.4 (C) and 57.3 (C). Devin leads on schema & documentation, security & auth and transparency & trust.

Are Devin and Orca open source?

No open-source release is listed for Devin. Orca is open source (MIT).

Other comparisons with Devin or Orca

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