Sistava

OpenHands

Open-source software engineering agents with a GUI, CLI, SDK and cloud

About OpenHands

OpenHands, from All Hands AI and formerly OpenDevin, is an open source platform for software engineering agents. The agent works in a sandbox where it can read and write files, run shell commands, browse and call APIs, driven from a browser canvas, a feature-complete CLI, a Python SDK or a managed cloud. Its licence is permissive and its benchmark results are published openly. Sistava is not a coding tool: it hires employees for sales, marketing, support and operations.

Platform details

Official website

What is OpenHands?

OpenHands gives a coding agent a real workspace. Inside a sandbox it can edit files, run shell commands, execute tests, browse documentation and call APIs, which is what lets it take a task from an issue through to a pull request instead of only suggesting code. There is more than one way in. Agent Canvas is the browser client, the CLI is feature-complete for terminal work, the Python SDK is for embedding agents into your own products, and there is a managed cloud alongside local and enterprise self-hosting. Being open matters here beyond ideology. You can read the agent loop, pin the model you trust, keep source code inside your own network, and publish or check benchmark results yourself. For teams with compliance constraints, that is often the deciding property.

Free software is not the same as free

Self-hosting removes the licence fee and replaces it with two other costs: the model provider bill, which scales with how hard the agent works, and the engineering time to run the sandbox, keep it updated and keep it secure. For an engineering team that cost is usually worth paying, because they already have the skills and the control is genuinely valuable. For a five-person company with no engineers, it is not a saving at all. Sistava sits at the other end deliberately: managed, flat-priced with model calls included, and directed in plain language. The tradeoff we accept is that you cannot self-host us or swap the underlying stack.

Different jobs, occasionally the same buyer

A technical founder might genuinely evaluate both, and the sensible answer is usually both, for different work. OpenHands takes the engineering backlog; a Sistava employee takes the outreach, the support inbox and the content calendar. What we would avoid is the reverse framing, where an open source coding agent is expected to run marketing because it can execute shell commands. Capability is not the constraint there; role, memory, approvals and business tool access are. If control over data and models is your hard requirement across everything, be aware that is a real gap on our side. We are a managed platform, and that is a considered choice, not an oversight.

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