OpenHands: The 91k-Star Open-Source Devin Alternative That Runs Fully Local
OpenHands: The 91k-Star Open-Source Devin Alternative That Runs Fully Local Devin costs $500/month per seat. Most teams never even get off the waitlist. Meanwhile, the open-source alternative that scores at the top of SWE-bench Verified has been sitting on GitHub with 91,000+ stars — free, MIT-licensed, and ready to run on your laptop right now. If you're a developer who's watched the AI coding…
OpenHands is an open-source alternative to the AI coding agent Devin, with a massive 91,000+ stars on GitHub. Unlike Devin, which costs $500 per seat per month and puts users on a waitlist, OpenHands is free and MIT-licensed, making it accessible to anyone. The key difference is that OpenHands is a fully local, self-hosted solution that runs on your laptop or infrastructure, rather than being cloud-based.
At its core, OpenHands is a three-layer system. First, there's an event stream architecture that allows agents, environments, and user interfaces to communicate through a structured event stream, enabling replayability, multi-agent coordination, and observability. Second, there's a sandboxed runtime that runs the agent inside a Docker container with a bash shell, headless browser, IPython kernel, and the full toolchain.
This sandbox is ephemeral by default but can be mounted with your local workspace for editing code. Lastly, there's the agent-computer interface, which defines a set of tools the agent can invoke, such as file system manipulation, shell commands, browser navigation, and more.
The flagship agent, CodeAct, uses Python code blocks to interact with these tools, allowing it to write loops, conditionals, variables, and more. This approach enables debuggability, expressiveness, and composability, as the agent can write complex workflows as a single coherent script.
To get started with OpenHands, you can run it locally for free using npm or Docker. The Docker option is recommended, as it ensures a sandboxed environment for your agent. Once installed, you can use the SDK to build your own agents or automate tasks using the Automation Server.
OpenHands offers several advantages over Devin. It runs locally, providing full control, auditability, and the ability to use any LLM of your choice. It's also more cost-effective, with no per-seat licensing fees. By offering a platform rather than a managed service, OpenHands empowers developers to build and operate their own AI coding agents with the flexibility and transparency of open-source software.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
