OpenHands

OpenHands is an open-source platform for autonomous AI software agents, built by All Hands AI. It lets an agent act as a full software engineer: writing code, running terminal commands, browsing documentation, calling APIs and opening pull requests. Given a GitHub issue or a task description, OpenHands plans and executes the whole solution without per-step direction. It has 84.3k GitHub stars and is MIT licensed. The agent runs in a sandboxed Docker environment with a terminal, code editor, browser and file system. It installs dependencies, runs test suites, debugs failures and iterates until the task completes. Verified integrations are GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket for source control, Jira for issue tracking, Slack for notification, Linear for planning, and PagerDuty as a workflow trigger. MCP support ships on every plan, and it is client-side: OpenHands connects out to external MCP servers and uses their tools automatically, rather than publishing an endpoint other agents connect into. The primary surface is Agent Canvas, a browser-based UI and backend server that replaced the legacy CLI and Local GUI as the default. All Hands AI publishes the OpenHands Index, a public benchmark that is unusually strong evidence for this category. It scores model and SDK combinations across five categories of real software engineering work: Issue Resolution, Greenfield, Frontend, Testing and Information Gathering. Issue Resolution aggregates SWE-bench and SWE-bench-multimodal. The leaderboard publishes per-category score, dollar cost and runtime for 33 model configurations, 17 open and 16 closed, with downloadable logs for each run. There are three tiers. Two of them are free and clearly published, and only Enterprise is quote-only. Local Open Source is free and self-hosted with unlimited conversations, a web GUI, terminal UI and CLI, and any model via bring-your-own-key. SaaS Individual is free with hosted access, bring-your-own-key or at-cost model providers, and Git integrations. Enterprise is contact-sales and is the only route to multi-user RBAC, SAML and SSO, centralized billing, the Agent Control Plane, the Large Codebase SDK and VPC self-hosting. What free does not buy is any of those governance features, and on the hosted tiers it does not buy model inference either, which is billed to your own provider key. Two things a buyer should weigh before adopting the hosted product. All Hands AI states in its privacy policy that it may use content and feedback from your use of the Services to train and tune its AI models, and publishes no mechanism to opt out of that. Self-hosting the MIT build avoids it entirely, because nothing leaves your environment. Separately, the company runs a Vanta trust center that publishes a controls framework and subprocessors but names no certification at all, and lists an engagement letter rather than a completed attestation. OpenHands is not the right fit for unsupervised production deployment without strong code review. It can return incorrect or partial solutions on ambiguous requirements, and is best treated as a capable junior engineer whose work is reviewed before merging. Devin at $20/mo and GitHub Copilot at $10/mo are commercial alternatives with managed infrastructure and support commitments. Teams unwilling to manage model API spend or Docker infrastructure will find the self-hosted path more demanding. Current state Q3 2026.