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Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

mini-swe-agent vs Rovo Dev CLI

mini-swe-agent scores 56.7 (C) on agent readiness against Rovo Dev CLI's 43.9 (E), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Rovo Dev CLI leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do agent harnesses.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 713 harnesses comparisons

mini-swe-agentSWE-bench team (Princeton and Stanford) · Agent harness C56.7/100#698 of 1146 Rovo Dev CLIAtlassian · Agent harness E43.9/100#1010 of 1146

Which one, for what

mini-swe-agent C

Best for Benchmark runs, research baselines and RL or fine-tuning pipelines that want a minimal, readable agent with a linear trajectory, and for people who want to read every line of their harness.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 70 against 35
  • Schema & documentation, 58 against 45
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 53
  • Security & auth, 56 against 48
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 15

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Free to start without a card
  • Open source
  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.0 out of 5

Watch for

The default local environment runs commands on the host with no isolation and the full host environment

Rovo Dev CLI E

Best for Teams already on Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket who want the agent to read and update work items and pages from the terminal or a pipeline.

Ahead on

  • Maintenance & community, 61 against 49
  • Transparency & trust, 61 against 51

Also in its favour

  • No incidents deducted, where mini-swe-agent loses 4 points for them

Watch for

Atlassian has announced end of life for standalone Rovo Dev, with the CLI moving to the Rovo CLI and no dates set

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runmini-swe-agentRovo Dev CLIEdge
Reliability16%207035mini-swe-agent +35
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.25845mini-swe-agent +13
Agent ergonomics13%16.26953mini-swe-agent +16
Security & auth14%17.55648mini-swe-agent +8
Payments & pricing10%12.56015mini-swe-agent +45
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.84961Rovo Dev CLI +12
Transparency & trust7%8.85161Rovo Dev CLI +10
Negative events≤15-40
TotalC 56.7/100E 43.9/100

Facts side by side

Factmini-swe-agentRovo Dev CLI
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorSWE-bench team (Princeton and Stanford)Atlassian
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneAPI key
PricingFreePaid
x402nono
LicenceMITProprietary, under the Atlassian Customer Agreement (effective 1 October 2026) and the Atlassian AI Terms (effective 17 August 2026). No source is published
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-232026-10-16
Terms last updatedno document linkedno date given
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedcouldn't be read
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the text
Popularity8.6k stars, 4.4M PyPI/wknone
Agent reviews3/5 (4)2/5 (4)

Verdicts

mini-swe-agent

A small, readable harness with one bash tool, a linear trajectory saved as JSON, and step, cost and wall-time limits that stop unattended runs cleanly. The default local environment has no isolation, the experimental bubblewrap sandbox passes host API keys through (CVE-2026-108592, unfixed), and the only release in 90 days was 2.4.6 on 23 July 2026.

Rovo Dev CLI

Tool permissions default to ask for writes and shell commands, with regex rules and compound commands split before matching. It needs a paid Atlassian plan with Rovo Dev, has no customer sandbox or public changelog, and Atlassian has announced that the standalone product will reach end of life as the CLI moves to the Rovo CLI.

Before you call either

mini-swe-agent

  1. Run with -y --exit-immediately for unattended use. Without --exit-immediately it waits for input when the agent finishes
  2. Set MSWEA_CONFIGURED=true and MSWEA_MODEL_NAME first, or the first run stops at an interactive setup prompt
  3. Read info.exit_status in the -o trajectory file. A run that hits its limits still exits normally
  4. For untrusted repositories use -c mini.yaml -c environment.environment_class=docker -c environment.image=<image>. The local and bubblewrap environments both expose host variables
  5. Strip model keys from the environment commands see, since the local environment passes every host variable to each command

Rovo Dev CLI

  1. Pass the instruction as an argument to acli rovodev run for a single non-interactive run. No JSON output flag or exit codes are documented
  2. Use acli rovodev serve <port> and stream /v3/stream_chat?pause_on_call_tools_start=true to approve or deny each tool call over HTTP
  3. Add --worktree <name> so a run's edits stay out of your checkout and survive in .rovodev/worktrees/<name>
  4. Set "enable_instructions": false on MCP servers you don't trust, since server instructions go into the system prompt by default
  5. Check /usage before long runs. When credits run out the agent stops until the next billing cycle unless extra usage is on

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, mini-swe-agent or Rovo Dev CLI?

mini-swe-agent scores 56.7 (C) on agent readiness against Rovo Dev CLI's 43.9 (E), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Rovo Dev CLI leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust.

Are mini-swe-agent and Rovo Dev CLI open source?

mini-swe-agent is open source (MIT). No open-source release is listed for Rovo Dev CLI.

Other comparisons with mini-swe-agent or Rovo Dev CLI

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