Comparisons
Enterprise AI
Agent Governance
Factory vs Cognition for enterprise agent controls
October 1, 2026 - 6 minute read
Sierra, OpenCode, Hermes, Amp, Oh My Pi (OMP), Pi, OpenAI, and Anthropic belong in the wider agent discussion, but an enterprise shortlist needs to separate their products and responsibilities. Factory vs Cognition becomes a concrete decision when an administrator can show which policy applies to a developer, a repository, and an unattended job.
Factory's agent is Droid. Cognition's agent is Devin. As of October 1, 2026, both vendors document enterprise administration. The useful evidence is a denied action, an attributable change, and predictable offboarding, with the selected product surface and commercial plan attached to each requirement.
Start with the wider agent and harness landscape
Sierra builds agents for customer experience. An organization evaluating customer-service automation should assess those workflows directly. A software-engineering harness needs a different acceptance test, such as editing a repository, running its tests, and producing a reviewable change.
Pi takes a minimal coding-agent approach, with extensions, skills, and packages adding behavior around the core. That puts extension selection and maintenance into the operating decision. Oh My Pi documents a more integrated toolset, including subagents, plan mode, language-server support, and debugging. OMP refers to that project here, rather than a model provider.
OpenCode's enterprise documentation describes restricting providers to approved infrastructure and recommends disabling sharing when data must stay within the organization. Those are relevant controls to test, rather than assuming an extensible coding agent has no enterprise configuration.
Amp uses generalist and specialized models for different work. Review which model-selection decisions the service makes and which choices the organization governs. A model name in a procurement spreadsheet does not describe the entire agent configuration.
Hermes Agent from Nous Research emphasizes persistent knowledge and a learning loop that creates and improves skills. Review who can change those durable instructions and how the team inspects them. Skill and memory updates should not be confused with evidence of model-weight training.
OpenAI documents Codex sandboxing and approvals, giving a pilot concrete execution boundaries to exercise. Anthropic's Claude Code overview covers terminal, IDE, desktop, and web surfaces. Neither provider should be reduced to its underlying model API or an outdated description of a single interface.
The narrower Factory and Cognition comparison starts when the requirement spans organization policy, developer workflows, and owned automation. A configurable harness may fit a team that wants to assemble its own operating environment. For Factory and Devin, test how the documented platform controls behave across the surfaces the team will actually deploy.
Read benchmark numbers before making policy claims
Factory's September 25, 2025 Terminal-Bench report illustrates why the harness deserves evaluation alongside the model. On Core v0.1.1, an 80-task set, the published chart reports Droid with Opus 4.1 at 58.8% and Claude Code with Opus 4.1 at 43.2%. For GPT-5, it reports Droid at 52.5% and Codex CLI at 42.8%.
The original chart rounds Droid's headline 58.75% result to 58.8%. These are historical configurations, not a current leaderboard or a Devin head-to-head result. Factory reports five runs per model and submission of all runs. Droid used non-interactive execution with permissions skipped inside the benchmark sandbox.
That last detail matters for an enterprise-controls comparison. A task-completion score does not establish approval behavior, identity lifecycle, or audit coverage. Use the result to justify testing the complete harness, then separately test Factory's managed settings and Cognition's controls under the intended production restrictions.
Factory vs Cognition on access and ownership
Factory's identity documentation describes SAML/OIDC sign-in, SCIM Directory Sync, and Owner, Manager, and User roles. Service accounts have their own API keys and identity. An automated job can belong to the organization instead of depending on a teammate's account.
Cognition documents custom roles and RBAC for Devin Enterprise, including assigning roles to users or identity-provider groups. That is a meaningful capability for a buyer who needs fine-grained application access. Factory documents three organization roles, so a requirement for custom application roles deserves a separate check in the evaluation.
Provisioning deserves a separate acceptance test. Cognition's Devin Desktop admin guide covers SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and team management. Its separate enterprise SSO workflow should be checked for the chosen Devin surface. Do not assume that the presence of one sign-in integration establishes the same provisioning behavior across every product.
Create a pilot developer with access to one repository. Confirm the person can work there, cannot administer organization policy, and loses the intended access after offboarding. Run the same exercise for an automation identity. Record what happens to existing sessions, stored credentials, and work already submitted to source control.
Factory's service-account model is useful when recurring maintenance must survive an employee's departure. The operational benefit comes from explicit ownership and independently managed credentials. Repository authorization still needs its own review. A platform role is not a substitute for the permissions granted by the source-control provider.
Factory vs Cognition on enforceable policy
Factory distinguishes hard controls from session defaults in Enterprise Controls and Managed Settings. Organization policy is authoritative for hard controls. More-local preferences can select defaults inside those boundaries. A user's preferred model and the organization's permitted model set are different decisions.
That distinction is useful during a gradual rollout. A platform team can govern approved model IDs and custom-model destinations while allowing a repository to choose its usual model from the permitted set. Factory documents controls for user-supplied custom models, allowed base URLs, autonomy ceilings, MCP access, and cloud session synchronization.
Consider a team with an approved internal model gateway. The acceptance test should attempt to select an unapproved model and add an unapproved custom endpoint from lower-level settings. The expected result comes from the effective policy, not from a prompt asking Droid to follow company rules. Review which setting wins before treating the configuration as enforced.
Devin also has CLI permission rules for commands, file access, and MCP tools, with documented precedence. Both products need permission tests against the team's actual commands. Evaluate the particular rule, source of authority, and override behavior in each product.
Factory's advantage for this requirement is the explicit connection between organization boundaries and local preferences. A team can explain which choices developers retain and which controls they cannot weaken through lower-level configuration. Test that property with the client version being deployed, then preserve the effective configuration as rollout evidence.
Test command policy without mistaking it for isolation
Factory's permission rules distinguish allowing a command, asking for approval, and blocking it. A block has no approval path. An approval requirement is weaker, because unsafe permission-skipping mode skips confirmations while effective command blocks still apply.
The rules match command forms, so spelling matters. A policy written for one argument order may not cover another. Factory documents examples that should match and examples that should not, plus a checker for previewing the decision without executing the command. Confirm that rule enforcement is enabled and supported before replacing an existing restriction.
This makes a practical pilot more informative than a permissions screenshot. In a disposable repository, check the harmless inspection commands the team needs and the write commands that should require review. Include alternate argument orderings. Retain the checker output and compare it with the effective decision during an authorized test run.
Command policy is only one boundary. Factory's sandbox documentation describes OS-level filesystem and network isolation. Keep access to credentials and external systems narrow at the operating-system and infrastructure layers as well. Neither a natural-language instruction nor an approval dialog should carry the whole security requirement.
Apply the same standard to Devin. Ask for evidence of the selected configuration's behavior, including failure and override cases. The defensible preference for Factory is a policy configuration your team can inspect and maintain, rather than a claim that any agent can be made incapable of mistakes.
Separate administrative audit from execution evidence
Factory's Audit Log records organization events such as membership changes, service-account changes, integrations, and managed-settings updates. Access is documented for Enterprise organization owners. These records help explain who changed the platform's controls.
Cognition also documents an audit-log API. Audit availability is therefore another area where the comparison should acknowledge both products. Examine the event types, access requirements, export process, and retention that apply to the purchased configuration.
An administrative log and a record of engineering work answer different questions. For a submitted patch, retain the repository revision, resulting diff, test output, and reviewer decision. For a policy change, retain the actor and configuration revision. Do not assume that either vendor's administrative audit automatically provides a complete command-by-command account.
Keep the resulting records in the organization's approved evidence store. Choose retention and access deliberately, rather than assuming a detailed agent transcript belongs in every observability system.
Make the enterprise decision on a failed action
An enterprise pilot should include a denied operation, a removed user, and an unattended job with a named owner. These tests expose the controls that matter after the first successful pull request. Use synthetic data and a disposable environment, and keep production credentials out of the exercise.
Factory is a strong fit when the priority is governing model access, tools, autonomy, and local customization through an explicit settings hierarchy. Cognition's documented custom roles and Devin permissions remain substantive alternatives. The deciding evidence is whether the selected configuration enforces the organization's actual requirements with an acceptable administrative burden.
Keep the procurement record specific. Name the surface, plan, client version, policy owner, and evidence required for approval. A conditional decision backed by those details is more useful than declaring either vendor the universal enterprise winner.
Discuss a Droid pilot against your organization's policy requirements.
