OpenHands is a capable, actively developed open-source AI coding agent that is genuinely free to self-host, but its highest-profile benchmark number is self-reported and its security-disclosure history includes a documented slow response to serious vulnerability reports.
OpenHands, formerly known as OpenDevin, is an open-source AI coding agent built by All Hands AI. It started in March 2024 as a community reaction to Cognition's Devin, adopted the MIT license, and has since grown into a project with over 80,000 GitHub stars. It can be self-hosted for free, used through a capped free cloud tier, or licensed as an Enterprise product with custom pricing. This review looks at what it costs, what its benchmark claims do and do not show, and what its security track record looks like.
Run the MIT-licensed core locally with your own LLM API key, sign up for the free OpenHands Cloud tier, or arrange an Enterprise deployment as SaaS or self-hosted in your own VPC.
OpenHands uses the CodeAct approach, representing the agent's actions as Python or bash code executed inside a sandboxed Docker container instead of JSON tool calls.
The agent can run terminal commands, execute Python via IPython, browse the web with a Playwright-based browser tool, and edit files directly inside the sandbox.
The Agent SDK tags proposed actions with a risk level, low, medium, high, or unknown, and can require human confirmation before executing risky actions, depending on the configured policy.
EDITORIAL NOTEApplied a -0.3 override to reflect a documented pattern the weighted average understates: a security researcher's roughly 148-day wait before two significant prompt-injection vulnerabilities reached public disclosure, plus a separately confirmed critical-severity command-injection CVE, both weighing on overall trust posture.
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The core OpenHands agent is open source under the MIT license and free to self-host, though you supply your own LLM API key. OpenHands Cloud also offers a free individual tier capped at 10 conversations per day. Enterprise deployment pricing is custom and not published.
OpenHands began in March 2024 as an open-source project originally named OpenDevin, described by its creators as an homage to Cognition's Devin. Unlike Devin, a closed commercial product, OpenHands' core is MIT licensed and can be self-hosted, with model-agnostic support for bringing your own LLM.
OpenHands' own paper for its Software Agent SDK reports a 72.8% resolve rate on SWE-Bench Verified when paired with Claude Sonnet 4.5 with extended thinking enabled. That figure is self-reported by the OpenHands team, not independently replicated, and third-party reviews report lower figures, around 53%, when OpenHands is paired with other models, so any single percentage depends heavily on the underlying model.
Yes. A confirmed command-injection vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-33718 and GHSA-7h8w-hj9j-8rjw, affected versions up to 1.4.0 and was fixed in 1.5.0. Separately, an independent security researcher reported two prompt-injection issues in March 2025, one allowing zero-click data exfiltration through rendered images and one allowing remote code execution; the researcher's writeup describes roughly 148 days passing before publishing the findings publicly in August 2025.
It depends on the deployment mode. Self-hosted use with your own LLM key does not send data to OpenHands' own servers, though your prompts and code do go to whichever LLM provider you configure. On OpenHands Cloud, the privacy policy states that submitted content, including prompts and code, may be used to train and tune OpenHands' AI models. Enterprise deployments are marketed as keeping code and conversations inside the customer's own infrastructure.
OpenHands is developed by All Hands AI, a company founded in July 2024 by Robert Brennan, Xingyao Wang, and Graham Neubig to steward the open-source project after it launched as OpenDevin in March 2024. The company has raised a $5 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures and an $18.8 million Series A led by Madrona.
OpenHands is a legitimate, actively maintained open-source alternative to closed commercial coding agents, with real cost advantages for teams willing to self-host or manage their own infrastructure. Its most-quoted benchmark figure is self-reported, and its security-disclosure history includes a notably slow response to two serious vulnerability reports, so treat both the performance claims and the security posture as items to verify against current, primary sources before relying on them for a production deployment.