The best Devin alternatives, compared honestly
Devin is the most product-complete autonomous coding agent on the market: cloud sessions, a CLI, the former Windsurf IDE (renamed Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026), code review and DeepWiki under one subscription. The problem is not the agent, it is the meter. Devin is billed in Agent Compute Units on Enterprise and in a token quota on self-serve, and Cognition publishes no price per ACU, no ACU count per plan and no allowance figure for any plan: its pricing page says light, increased, significantly higher and generous. This page compares seven alternatives on one axis, whether you can name the unit you are buying and price a task before you run it.
The best Devin alternative depends on which part of the meter is hurting:
- You need the bill to be capped → OpenHands: MIT, model access at cost with no markup, and an organization monthly budget that blocks new conversations at 100%.
- You want Devin's shape, priced → OpenAI Codex: remote cloud tasks from $20 per month, with the full rate card published in credits per million tokens.
- You want a unit with a printed dollar value → GitHub Copilot cloud agent: 1 AI credit is $0.01, and Pro at $10 per month includes 1,500 of them.
- You want a hard stop, not an invoice → Google Jules: 15, 100 or 300 whole tasks per rolling 24 hours, with no overage to buy.
Narrower cases are in the table below: Claude Code if you want published per-day cost data and a spend flag, Cursor if the editor matters more than the allowance, Cline if you would rather pay your model provider directly.
Why teams look elsewhere
What pushes teams off Devin
Devin did not get worse at the job; by most accounts it got better, and it now covers more of the workflow than anything else here. Six things recur when teams try to budget for it, and all six are visible on Cognition's own pages as of August 2026.
The size of the allowance is an adjective
Devin's pricing page describes what your money buys with the words light on Free, increased on Pro, significantly higher on Max and generous on a Teams full seat. No plan's included allowance appears anywhere on that page as a number, in tokens, tasks, sessions or dollars.
The one named unit is behind an order form
Agent Compute Units are still Devin's unit, but only for Enterprise, and the documentation states they are billed at the rate set in their order form. That means no public price per ACU and no public count of included ACUs. The docs still measure in ACUs anyway, noting that an idle session sleeps after roughly 0.1 ACUs of inactivity.
Nothing published maps an ACU to work
Usage accrues on the number and complexity of actions the agent takes plus virtual machine time and bandwidth. No Cognition page maps one ACU to a number of tokens, a number of minutes or a dollar figure. The often-repeated claim that one ACU is about 15 minutes of work is not on any Cognition page we could find in August 2026.
The metered part has no ceiling of its own
Past your quota on Devin Desktop, Cognition bills extra usage at API list prices, and its own documentation is explicit that quota limits never limit your extra usage. Spending controls do exist, including default session spending limits and, on Enterprise, per-organization and per-user ACU caps that stop all activity at the limit. You just cannot set them from a published rate.
March 2026: credits out, quotas in
The credit system was replaced by daily and weekly token quotas. Existing subscribers were grandfathered at $15 per month and $30 per seat per month indefinitely, against current list prices of $20 per month and $40 per seat per month, and old add-on credits were converted at the $0.04 per credit they were sold for. The same migration notes that new Teams plans do not include SSO, which is now Enterprise-only.
June 2, 2026: Windsurf became Devin Desktop
One fewer product to compare against. As of August 2026 windsurf.com returns HTTP 308 to devin.ai/desktop, windsurf.com/pricing redirects to devin.ai/pricing, and the old codeium.com still 301s into the same chain. Cognition's migration FAQ says plainly that pricing is unchanged for all plan types, so the rename itself is not the cost story; the March quota migration is.
The shortlist
7 Devin alternatives worth evaluating
This category splits into two jobs that get confused constantly. One is the remote autonomous agent: you hand it a ticket, it works in its own container and comes back with a pull request. The other is the in-IDE assistant that needs you in the loop. Only the first is a Devin peer, and the list says so where a pick is not one. The ranking optimises for a single thing, whether the vendor tells you what unit you are buying and lets you cap it, and every pick carries one honest strength and one real weakness.
The agent is MIT licensed (verified in the repo's LICENSE file) and the hosted tier resells model access at cost, with no markup, so the unit you are billed in is the provider's own published token price. It is also the only option here with a documented hard ceiling: an organization monthly cap plus a default per-user budget, with alerts at 80%, 90% and 100% and new conversations blocked at the cap. Weakness: the free cloud tier allows only 10 conversations per day, you still carry the model bill yourself, and self-hosting is your operations work.
Cloud tasks in a remote container, a CLI, an IDE extension and automatic code review, which is the same job Devin does. Plans run $8, $20 and from $100 per month for individuals and $20 per user per month billed annually ($25 monthly) for Business. Usage is metered in credits and OpenAI publishes the whole rate card in credits per million tokens per model. Weakness: the allowance is published as a range, 10 to 100 Sol messages per five hour window on Plus, and the dollar value of one credit is not on the pricing page.
Anthropic prints per-model token prices (Opus 4.6 at $5 per million input and $25 per million output tokens) and, unusually, publishes its own field data: about $13 per developer per active day and $150 to $250 per developer per month, under $30 per active day for 90% of users. There is a --max-budget-usd flag and a per-session dollar figure in /usage. Weakness: two billing worlds, and the subscription plans' limits are no more numeric than Devin's.
The unit is one whole task and the count is printed: 15 tasks per rolling 24 hours on the free tier, 100 on Pro, 300 on Ultra, with 3, 15 and 60 concurrent tasks. There is no overage to buy, so the worst case is waiting for a reset rather than reading an invoice. Weakness: paid tiers are bundled into a Google AI subscription that is currently limited to individual accounts ending in @gmail.com, and you cannot buy more capacity even when you want to.
GitHub states the exchange rate outright: 1 AI credit = $0.01 USD, with 1,500 credits per month on Pro at $10 per month, 7,000 on Pro+ at $39 per month and 20,000 on Max at $100 per month. Assign an issue and the agent opens a pull request. Weakness: two meters for one task, because the cloud agent consumes GitHub Actions minutes and AI credits, and unused credits are forfeited at the start of each calendar month.
$20, $60 and $200 per month for individuals and $40 per user per month for Teams, with cloud agents included from Pro upward, so it is a real remote-agent option and not only an IDE. Weakness: the included allowance is published only as a multiple of a number Cursor never states, 3x Pro limits on Pro+ and 20x on Ultra, and on-demand usage past it is billed in arrears.
Apache-2.0, bring your own key, and therefore no intermediary unit at all: you pay your provider's published token price and cap it in your provider's console. Weakness, and it is a big one for this page: Cline is an in-IDE agent with a human in the loop, not a remote agent that picks up a ticket and finishes it alone. It belongs on this list as the transparency baseline, not as a like-for-like Devin replacement.
Deliberately left off: Aider is Apache-2.0 and excellent, but like Cline it keeps a human in the loop and has no hosted tier, so it adds no new row to a table about billing units. Amazon Q Developer, Zed and JetBrains AI are seat-metered in-IDE assistants rather than autonomous agents. Cognition's own Devin Review is not an alternative to Devin.
Side by side
Devin alternatives compared
Prices as of August 2026, from each vendor's own pricing page, in USD from a US-English fetch. The column that decides most migrations is not features, it is billing unit plus the two columns either side of it: whether the vendor publishes what the unit buys, and whether you can set a ceiling. An empty-looking cell here is a finding, not a gap. Devin's own row is the baseline.
| Agent | Type | Billing unit | Included allowance, published? | Overage rate | Hard spend cap | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Devin | Remote agent, IDE and CLI | ACU on Enterprise, token quota on self-serve; ACU size never defined | Not published: “light”, “increased”, “significantly higher” | Extra usage at API list prices; no per-ACU rate published | Yes: session limits, org and per-user ACU caps | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| OpenHands | Remote agent, cloud or self-hosted | Model tokens at cost, no markup | Cloud Individual: 10 conversations per day | Provider list price, no markup | Yes: org monthly budget plus per-user budgets | ✓ MIT |
| OpenAI Codex | Cloud tasks, CLI and IDE | Credit; rate card published in credits per 1M tokens | 10 to 100 Sol messages per 5 hour window on Plus | Buy credits; dollar value per credit not on the pricing page | No published spend cap for individuals | ✗ proprietary |
| Claude Code | CLI and cloud sessions | API tokens, or plan usage on a subscription | Plan limits not published in tokens | API list price: Opus 4.6 $5 in, $25 out per 1M tokens | Yes: --max-budget-usd per session | ✗ proprietary |
| Google Jules | Remote agent only | One task | 15, 100 or 300 tasks per rolling 24 hours | None: you wait for the reset | Yes, by design: no overage exists | ✗ proprietary |
| GitHub Copilot cloud agent | Remote agent inside Actions | AI credit at $0.01, plus Actions minutes | 1,500, 7,000 or 20,000 credits per month | $0.01 per credit, plus Actions minutes | Yes: budgets, and extra usage may be capped | ✗ proprietary |
| Cursor | IDE agent plus cloud agents | Model usage, size given only as a multiple | “3x Pro limits”; the base is not published | On-demand usage billed in arrears | No published spend cap | ✗ proprietary |
| Cline | In-IDE agent, bring your own key | Your provider's own token price | Not applicable: no included allowance | Your provider's list price | Yes: your provider's spend limit | ✓ Apache-2.0 |
Seat prices, every cycle labelled: Devin Pro $20 per month, Max $200 per month, Teams $80 per month minimum, full seats $40 per month each counting toward it, Enterprise by order form. OpenHands local and cloud Individual free, Enterprise custom. Codex Go $8 per month, Plus $20 per month, Pro from $100 per month, Business $20 per user per month billed annually ($25 per user per month billed monthly). Claude Pro $20 per month billed monthly or $17 per month billed annually ($200 up front), Max from $100 per month, Team premium seat with Claude Code $100 per seat per month billed annually ($125 billed monthly). Copilot Pro $10 per month, Pro+ $39 per month, Max $100 per month. Cursor $20, $60 and $200 per month, Teams $40 per user per month. Jules paid tiers are bundled into a Google AI subscription; that page is served regionally and returned no USD figure to us, so we do not quote one. Cline is free and you pay your model provider directly. Pricing and free tiers change often; check each vendor for current terms. Compiled August 2026.
Official pages: Devin · Devin usage docs · OpenHands · OpenAI Codex · Claude · Google Jules · GitHub Copilot · Cursor · Cline
The arithmetic Cognition does not print
Cognition does publish one worked example, and it is enough to do the sum the pricing page leaves out. Its quota documentation walks through a single conversation, prompt Refactor @my_function, a plan, a confirmation, two file edits and a summary, and totals it at 200,000 tokens on Claude Opus 4.6. Extra usage past your quota is billed at API list prices, and Cognition's own model rate card gives Opus 4.6 at $5 per million input tokens, $25 per million output, $6.25 per million cache write and $0.50 per million cache read, matching Anthropic's published list exactly.
The example does not say how its mixed rows split between cache reads, cache writes and output, so the honest answer is a range. Treating every mixed row as a cache read gives about $0.34; splitting each mixed row evenly between its two named kinds gives about $1.83. So one refactor-one-function conversation on the most expensive frontier model costs somewhere around $0.34 to $1.83. Assumptions, all stated: Opus 4.6, Cognition's own 200,000-token example, extra-usage list pricing, mixed rows bounded in both directions, calculated August 2026.
Note what that number is and is not. It is the cost of extra usage on Devin Desktop, the part Cognition prices in tokens. The same calculation is impossible for a Devin Cloud session billed in ACUs, because there is no published rate to multiply by. That is the whole argument of this page in one sentence: the arithmetic exists exactly where the unit is named, and nowhere else.
A fair call
When Devin is still the right choice
Migrating is not free: you rebuild repository setup, secrets, integrations and the habits your team has built around one agent's review flow, and you lose Devin Desktop, DeepWiki and Devin Review as a bundle. For some teams the opaque unit is the feature, not the bug.
Devin is still right if…
- You want one fixed monthly line item and actively do not want to think about tokens. This is the case where the unpublished unit is an advantage: Cognition's claim is that for the majority of users the quota covers all agent usage, and if that holds for you, a $20 per month bill with no arithmetic is simpler than any per-token alternative.
- You want the whole bundle from one vendor: Devin Cloud sessions, Devin CLI, Devin Desktop, Devin Review and DeepWiki, with up to 10 concurrent sessions on Pro and unlimited on Max and Teams.
- You are on Enterprise and can negotiate the rate. An order-form ACU price is opaque to the public but perfectly legible to you, and Enterprise ACU caps stop all activity at the limit, which is a firmer guarantee than most competitors' soft overage.
- You were a Windsurf subscriber before March 2026. Grandfathered pricing at $15 per month or $30 per seat per month is below current list and holds indefinitely, so leaving costs you that discount.
Look elsewhere if…
- Finance needs a ceiling you can set before the month starts: OpenHands caps an organization and every user in it, and blocks new conversations at the cap.
- You want the same remote-task workflow with a published rate card: OpenAI Codex prints credits per million tokens for every model.
- You want the unit itself to carry a dollar sign: GitHub Copilot states that 1 AI credit is $0.01, then tells you how many you get.
- You would rather run out than overspend: Google Jules counts whole tasks and sells no overage at all.
- You need a licence you can audit and an agent you can host yourself: OpenHands is MIT and Cline is Apache-2.0, both verified in their repositories' LICENSE files.
Common questions
Common questions about Devin alternatives
What is the best Devin alternative in 2026?
OpenHands is the strongest all-round replacement for teams that want an autonomous coding agent whose cost they can predict. It is MIT licensed, its hosted tier resells model access at cost with no markup, and it is the only option in this comparison with a documented hard ceiling: an organization monthly budget plus per-user budgets, with new conversations blocked at 100% of the cap. If you want the product shape closest to Devin instead, OpenAI Codex runs cloud tasks in a remote container and publishes a full rate card in credits per million tokens.
What is an ACU, and how much does one cost?
An ACU, or Agent Compute Unit, is Cognition's unit for Devin's work: it accrues on the number and complexity of actions the agent takes, plus virtual machine time and network bandwidth. Cognition does not publish a dollar price for one ACU. Its documentation states that Enterprise customers are billed in ACUs at the rate set in their order form, and no per-ACU rate, ACU allowance or mapping from ACUs to tokens or minutes appears on any public Cognition page. The docs do use the unit in prose, noting that a session sleeps after roughly 0.1 ACUs of inactivity.
How much does Devin cost in 2026?
Devin's published plans are Free at $0, Pro at $20 per month, Max at $200 per month, and Teams at $80 per month minimum with full developer seats at $40 per month each counting toward that minimum, so one full seat still bills $80 and three bill $120, with Enterprise priced by order form. What those prices buy is described only with adjectives: the pricing page calls the included allowance light on Free, increased on Pro, significantly higher on Max and generous on a Teams full seat. Usage past the allowance is billed as extra usage at API list prices, and Cognition notes that quota limits never limit extra usage.
Can I work out what one Devin task will cost before running it?
Not on a plan quota, and not at all in ACUs. Cognition's own worked example totals 200,000 tokens for one conversation that refactors a single function. Priced at Claude Opus 4.6 list rates, which Cognition publishes as $5 per million input tokens, $25 per million output, $6.25 per million cache write and $0.50 per million cache read, that conversation lands between roughly $0.34 and $1.83 depending on how the example's mixed rows split. That arithmetic works only for extra usage on Devin Desktop. For a Devin Cloud session measured in ACUs there is no published rate to multiply by.
Is there a truly open-source Devin alternative?
Yes, and the licences are worth naming exactly. OpenHands is MIT and Cline is Apache-2.0, both verified in the repositories' own LICENSE files, and both are OSI-approved open source. Aider is also Apache-2.0. None of the open-source picks here ships under a source-available licence such as BSL, FSL or a Sustainable Use License, which are not open source, so there is no licence caveat to warn about in this category. Everything else in the comparison, Devin included, is proprietary.
What happened to Windsurf, and did its price change?
On June 2, 2026, Windsurf became Devin Desktop. It is the same IDE under the Devin brand, and as of August 2026 windsurf.com returns an HTTP 308 redirect to devin.ai/desktop while windsurf.com/pricing redirects to devin.ai/pricing. Cognition's own migration FAQ answers the price question directly: no, the current plan continues to work as it does today and pricing is unchanged, including for legacy Windsurf Enterprise plans. The change that did move money was earlier: in March 2026 credits were replaced by quotas, existing subscribers were grandfathered at $15 per month and $30 per seat per month against current list prices of $20 and $40, and new Teams plans no longer include SSO.