Factory AI alternatives for teams that bring their own model keys

Factory AI alternatives for a team that runs coding agents on its own model keys include Devin, Warp Factories, Tembo, OpenHands and SHIP. Compare them on what each product's own pages document: where work starts, whose keys pay for inference, which coding agents (harnesses) can run, what checks a change before a person reviews it, and how cost is reported. Factory's own docs, read on 2026-09-29, describe bring-your-own-key for its Droid CLI and desktop app, so staying on Factory is also an option.

Factory here is the company behind the Droid coding agent, at factory.com (formerly factory.ai). Going by how each product describes itself:

• Factory fits a team that wants one agent, Droid, in a desktop app, a CLI, IDEs and the web, with a managed model catalog and enterprise deployment options.
• Devin suits a team that wants a hosted engineer with its own cloud machine and browser, working on the models Devin offers.
• Warp Factories is built for a team that wants its agent pipeline defined as code, with Warp Agent, Claude Code or Codex chosen for each agent.
• Tembo fits a team that starts work from many tools, Sentry alerts included, and wants each person to bring the harness and subscription they already pay for.
• OpenHands makes sense for a team that wants an open-source (MIT) agent it can run locally or self-host, on any model LiteLLM supports.
• SHIP fits a team whose work lives in Linear or GitHub Issues and that wants each change to pass its own CI, a reviewer and a test stage before the pull request reaches a person, with the harness and model set per role.

Separate your own keys from model choice

Model choice and bring-your-own-key (BYOK) are easy to read as the same promise, but across these six products they bill in different places.

Picking a model from a vendor's catalog means the vendor serves it and charges you through its plan. Factory's managed models carry usage multipliers, Devin draws model use from a plan quota and sells extra usage at API pricing, Tembo's managed inference comes out of a dollar-denominated allowance, and OpenHands offers its own model provider at cost.

Bringing your own key means your provider bills you for inference directly. Factory's docs describe it for the Droid CLI and the desktop app, where custom models live in a local settings.json and "your API keys remain local and are not uploaded to Factory servers" (Custom Models (BYOK)). In Warp Factories, the Claude Code and Codex harnesses "each call their provider directly using credentials you supply", while Warp meters compute and orchestration credits for the run (Harnesses). Tembo charges $0 for BYOK inference and still bills the session's cloud VM (Models). OpenHands accepts any model LiteLLM supports, with your own API key (LLM settings). SHIP runs every role on the credentials you connect for Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter or Z.ai, encrypted at rest and never pooled across organizations (LLM credentials).

A subscription login is a third arrangement. Tembo connects Claude, ChatGPT and SuperGrok subscriptions on every plan, Free included, and SHIP accepts an Anthropic subscription credential alongside an API key.

Where the key sits matters to a security review as much as who bills it. Factory keeps BYOK keys on the developer's machine, and Warp stores Claude Code and Codex credentials for cloud runs as Warp-managed secrets. In SHIP, the agent's container starts with a placeholder and the platform rewrites the credential on its way out to the provider, so the real key is never in the container's environment or on its filesystem.

Compare the six products on their own documentation

Both tables use only each product's own docs, pricing page or llms.txt, read on 2026-09-29, and the sources section at the end lists every URL. A cell that none of those pages states reads Not documented, which is a statement about the pages, not about the product.

The first table covers how work reaches the agent and what runs it.

The second table covers what checks a change, what each product reports about cost, and how its prices are published.

Read each product on its own terms

Factory

Factory calls itself "the agent-native software factory: a system for delivering production software with AI agents (Droids) that plan, build, review, and ship under human direction" (llms.txt). Droid runs the same way in the Factory App, the Droid CLI, headless Droid Exec and on managed Droid Computers (Welcome). Linear and Jira delegation belong to Remote Delegations, which the docs mark as Private Preview on 2026-09-29, with the default Slack integration available outside it (Remote Delegations). For large pieces of work, Missions plan features and milestones with you first, then run them through Mission Control.

Factory suits a team that wants one vendor agent wherever its engineers already work, and that buys on enterprise terms: the Enterprise plan lists on-premise deployment, sub-organizations, data residency and dedicated compute with partitioned inference.

Devin

Cognition describes Devin as "an AI coding agent and software engineer" that teams run as "parallel cloud agents to fix bugs, ship features, refactor code, and review PRs" (llms.txt). A cloud session gets its own VM with a shell, a browser and full repository access (Devin Handoff). The part that stands out for verification is testing mode: after it opens a pull request, Devin plans a focused end-to-end test, runs it in its desktop, and sends you the screen recording.

You switch models with /model, choosing among those Devin serves (Models), and Devin's enterprise docs place its "brain" in Cognition's cloud under every deployment model (Enterprise Deployment). Devin fits a team that wants to message a hosted engineer from Slack, Teams, Linear or Jira and pay for inference through Devin's plans.

Warp Factories

Warp's docs call Factories "open infrastructure for building internal software factories as code, from triage to implementation, review, and monitoring" (Warp Factories). A foreman agent takes requests from Slack or Linear and routes each one through triage, spec, implement and review agents. When a request goes through planning, a person approves the spec before building starts by default; the review agent's verdict is advisory, and "merging stays with your team" (Factory agents).

Each agent picks its own harness and model, and Warp's own guidance is to give the review agent "a different model or harness from the implement agent, so the two don't share blind spots". The factory dashboard reports a median cost per PR, which Warp labels an estimate rather than a billing figure. Choose it when the pipeline itself should live in version control and be tuned with scorers, benchmarks and self-improvement pull requests.

Tembo

Tembo describes itself as harness and model agnostic: each agent sets a default harness, such as Claude Code with a Sonnet model or Codex with a GPT model, and a session can override it (Agents). The docs sum the product up as "Run any coding agent across your repos, tickets, and tools, with full visibility" (Tembo docs). Standard BYOK and Claude or ChatGPT subscriptions work on every plan, while the session's cloud VM draws on the workspace allowance at $0.0403 per vCPU-hour plus $0.0130 per GiB-RAM-hour (Pricing).

Tembo Previews expose the services running in a session as public preview links, so a reviewer can open the running product alongside the diff (llms.txt). It is a good match for a team that triggers work from many places, error alerts included, and lets each engineer bring their own harness.

OpenHands

The open-source version of OpenHands is MIT licensed and runs locally with your own LLM key through a web GUI, a CLI or the SDK, and OpenHands Cloud adds hosted sessions, Git provider integrations and a free Individual plan (Pricing). The project calls itself "the open-source, model-agnostic platform for cloud coding agents" (openhands.dev). With the GitHub integration installed, labeling an issue openhands or commenting @openhands starts work, and OpenHands opens a pull request when it judges the issue resolved (GitHub integration). The docs list the Jira and Linear integrations as "Coming soon" on 2026-09-29 (Project management tools).

The team it serves best wants to own the agent code and run it on its own machines and models, adding review with the PR review workflow it publishes for GitHub Actions.

SHIP

SHIP takes an issue through a Planner, a Builder, your own CI, a Reviewer, a preview deploy and a QA stage, and any gate that fails sends the work back to the Builder with the feedback. Work arrives when you assign a Linear issue to SHIP or comment @SHIP on a GitHub issue, or from the ship CLI, an MCP server or the HTTP API. Each role's harness and model is set in ship.yml (schema), with claude-code on Opus as the default for every role, and the CLI can pin either one for a single mission. CI and preview deploys run in your own pipeline with your own credentials.

Cost is measured from list prices for the model that served each call and reported per mission and per stage. In SHIP's own SWE-in-a-team study, which ran 13 builder configurations on the same 20 tickets with one trial each and API-equivalent cost, claude-sonnet-5 on claude-code resolved all 20 tickets at $4.31 per resolved ticket. SHIP fits a team that plans in Linear or GitHub Issues and wants each change through its own CI, the Reviewer and QA against a preview before anyone opens the pull request.

Choose by how your team works

Start from where requests already arrive and who should see the work first. The table maps common situations to the products whose own docs describe them.

Factory is the better choice when one agent has to be available to engineers in a desktop app, a CLI, their IDE and on mobile, and when enterprise terms such as on-premise deployment and data residency decide the purchase. Its BYOK path covers the CLI and the desktop app, which suits a team that works in those two surfaces.

Pick one of the others over SHIP when requests start in Jira or Slack, or when engineers want to edit alongside an agent in the editor. SHIP's docs describe Linear, GitHub Issues and the terminal as the ways work arrives, and its CLI hands over a finished plan or a pushed branch. A team that wants to message a hosted engineer and skip pipeline setup will find Devin closer, and a team that wants to write its own pipeline and grade it with evals will find Warp Factories closer.

Check the method and sources

Every fact about another product on this page comes from that product's own documentation, pricing page or llms.txt, fetched on 2026-09-29, most of it as the Markdown each docs site serves. Search results and third-party listicles for "factory ai alternatives", "factory ai byok", "factory ai vs devin" and "devin alternatives" were read only to see which products appear for those searches, and none is cited. SHIP facts come from SHIP's own docs, and the one SHIP number comes from SHIP's own study, with the sample and cost basis stated where it appears. Prices and plan contents change often, so check the vendor's page before you buy.

Factory, read 2026-09-29:

• factory.com/llms.txt
• Welcome to Factory
• Custom Models (BYOK)
• Available Models
• Factory Router
• Remote Delegations
• Linear delegation
• Automated Code Review
• Automated QA
• Factory Missions
• Cost & Productivity
• Individual Plans
• Organization Plans
• factory.com/pricing

Devin, read 2026-09-29:

• devin.ai/llms.txt
• Devin pricing
• Models
• Usage
• Linear
• Testing & Video Recordings
• Devin Review
• Hand off to Devin Cloud from Any Agent
• Enterprise Deployment
• Documentation index, for the Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, JetBrains and automation pages

Warp, read 2026-09-29:

• Warp Factories overview
• How Warp Factories work
• Factory agents
• Measure and improve a factory
• Connect Linear to your factory
• Harnesses in the Automation Platform
• Third-party cloud agent authentication
• warp.dev/llms.txt
• Warp pricing

Tembo, read 2026-09-29:

• Tembo documentation
• tembo.io/llms.txt
• Agents
• Models
• Pricing
• Linear
• GitHub
• List billing usage
• Documentation index, for the Jira, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Sentry and self-hosted pages

OpenHands, read 2026-09-29:

• openhands.dev
• OpenHands pricing
• Language Model (LLM) Settings
• GitHub integration
• Project management tool integrations
• ACP Agents
• Automated Code Review
• Budgets
• Metrics Tracking

SHIP, read 2026-09-29:

• LLM credentials
• ship.yml schema
• SWE-in-a-team study

Questions

What are the best Factory AI alternatives?

For a team that runs coding agents on its own model keys, the alternatives whose own pages document it are Warp Factories, Tembo, OpenHands and SHIP, and Devin is the other common comparison, running on models from its own catalog. Which one fits depends on where your requests start and what you want checked before a person reviews the pull request. All six were read on their own docs and pricing pages on 2026-09-29.

Does Factory support bring your own key?

Yes. Factory's docs, read on 2026-09-29, describe custom models (BYOK) in the Droid CLI and the desktop app: you add Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenAI-compatible endpoints such as OpenRouter or Ollama to a local settings.json, and the keys stay on your machine. Factory's Individual plans include BYOK free up to an allowance, after which usage is charged according to the plan.

What is the difference between Factory AI and Devin?

Factory's agent, Droid, runs in the Factory App, the Droid CLI and on Factory-managed cloud machines, and accepts your own model keys in the CLI and desktop app. Devin runs each cloud session on its own VM with a shell and browser, on models from Devin's catalog, and can test its pull request and send a video recording. As of 2026-09-29 both list a Pro plan at $20 and a Max plan at $200 a month.

What are the best Devin alternatives?

For your own keys and a choice of coding agent, look at Warp Factories (Warp Agent, Claude Code or Codex per agent), Tembo (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Amp, Pi and others), OpenHands (open source, any model LiteLLM supports) and SHIP (claude-code, codex, pi, kilo-code or open-code per role). For one vendor agent across a desktop app, a CLI and IDEs, Factory is the closer match. Each was checked on its own pages on 2026-09-29.

Is there an open-source Devin alternative?

OpenHands is MIT licensed and runs locally with your own LLM key, according to its pricing page on 2026-09-29. OpenHands Cloud adds a hosted version with a free Individual plan that takes your own key or its at-cost model provider.

Which Factory alternatives can run Claude Code or Codex?

Warp Factories, Tembo, OpenHands (through ACP in Agent Canvas) and SHIP each document running Claude Code and Codex, as of 2026-09-29. SHIP sets the harness per role in ship.yml, so the Reviewer can run on a different harness and model from the Builder.