OpenHands
Self-hosted, sandboxed coding agents — the whole stack runs on infrastructure you control.
OpenHands (MIT, formerly OpenDevin) is the option for people whose actual requirement is "this has to run on infrastructure I control." It is a self-hosted control centre for coding agents: a browser-based Agent Canvas plus a backend server you start locally or on your own VM, with agents working inside a sandboxed environment that has its own shell, filesystem and browser. Agents can edit code, run commands, call APIs and browse the web — real engineering tasks rather than completions. The project sells a managed OpenHands Cloud and licenses a self-hosted enterprise edition, but the core is MIT and self-hosting costs nothing beyond your own model usage. At 82.5k stars it is the most established self-hosted agent platform available.
What it does well
- +Genuinely self-hosted: server, sandbox and workspace all sit on your own infrastructure
- +Sandboxed execution — the agent gets a container, not unrestricted access to your laptop
- +Browser UI suits longer autonomous runs and reviewing what an agent actually did
- +MIT-licensed, 82.5k stars, committed to daily
Where it falls short
- −The heaviest setup here — Docker and real RAM, not a two-minute install
- −Long autonomous runs consume a lot of tokens; set a budget before you let one loose
- −Multi-user, RBAC and the richer integrations live in the paid Cloud and enterprise tiers
- −Not an in-editor experience — you leave your IDE to drive it, and there's no inline completion
Hardware note
Plan for a machine that can comfortably run Docker plus a sandbox container alongside your normal workload — 16 GB RAM is a practical minimum and 32 GB is more comfortable, whether that's a workstation or a small VM. If you also want the model in-house, that is a separate ~24 GB VRAM budget on top.
OpenHands as an alternative to
Where OpenHands shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
OpenHands head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.