Comparison
Shipwright vs Devin — the open source alternative.
Devin is the highest-profile autonomous coding agent — a managed commercial service with a strong benchmark track record. Here is the honest, sourced comparison: where the two genuinely differ, and where each one fits.
Facts verified as of July 14, 2026, from Devin's own primary sources (linked below). Re-checked immediately before this page ships — vendor terms change.
License & deployment, dimension by dimension
The defensible claim, in full: the only MIT-throughout, spec-to-deploy autonomous delivery agent that runs entirely in your own cloud. Each piece of that sentence is a real, cited difference — not a single empty-category claim.
| Dimension | Shipwright | Devin |
|---|---|---|
| License | MIT — single root license, no carve-outs. | Proprietary, commercial vendor product. |
| Deployment | Runs entirely in your own cloud — control plane included. | Cognition-hosted at every tier. Even the dedicated single-tenant VPC option is a Cognition-managed environment connected via PrivateLink/IPSec — never inside your own infrastructure. [source] |
| Pipeline | spec → plan → build → test → PR → deploy. | Spec through PR. The deploy step is not part of the agent's scope. [source] |
| Economics | Free, MIT, no tiers or seats. | Commercial, vendor-hosted — see the vendor's site for current terms. [source] |
From Shipwright's LICENSE:
"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software…"
One root MIT license, no per-module carve-outs. Devin ships no license file to compare against — it is not source-available.
The deployment contrast
Per Devin's own documentation, both of its Enterprise deployment models are Cognition-hosted. "Customer Dedicated Deployment" runs in a Cognition-managed single-tenant VPC connected via PrivateLink or IPSec — a private network path, not a private environment. Source: docs.devin.ai deployment overview.
Even Devin's dedicated single-tenant VPC tier is Cognition-hosted — never in your environment. Shipwright's control plane, agent runtime, and your code all run on infrastructure you own, at every tier, with no managed-service layer in between.
Choose Devin when
Choose Devin when
- You want a fully managed, vendor-hosted service with no infrastructure to run yourself.
- The task is well-scoped and isolated enough that fire-and-forget autonomy fits.
- You need off-the-shelf enterprise attestations — Cognition states SOC 2 Type II certification since September 2024 and lists ISO/IEC 27001:2022 on trust.cognition.ai.
- You are not committed to Claude Code and want a proprietary-model agent instead.
Choose Shipwright when
- You want the full pipeline — including the deploy stage — not just an opened PR.
- The code and the agent that writes it both need to stay entirely inside your own cloud, control plane included.
- MIT licensing matters to you: audit every line, fork it, no vendor lock-in.
- You've already committed to Claude Code and want a pipeline built for it, not averaged across providers.
Economics
Shipwright: free, MIT, no tiers or seats. Devin: a commercial, vendor-hosted service — see the vendor's site for current terms, which change over time.
Try it
Install the plugin into Claude Code and run a task end to end. Free, MIT, runs on your own infra.
/plugin install shipwright@app-vitals/shipwrightSee how Shipwright compares to the rest of the field → · What "self-hosted" actually means →