Comparisons
Enterprise AI
Agent Governance
Factory vs Cognition for enterprise agent controls
October 1, 2026 - 4 minute read
Choosing Factory vs Cognition involves more than trying their coding agents on a bug fix. Factory's agent is Droid, and Cognition's is Devin. Both can work with repository code and development tools, so a team also needs to decide which repositories, models, and commands they may use.
Suppose a scheduled dependency update runs after the engineer who set it up has left the company. The job needs a valid identity, limited permissions, and a record of who owns it. That is the kind of administrative requirement to test alongside code quality. Both vendors document enterprise controls as of October 2, 2026.
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. Compare the event types, access requirements, export process, and retention that apply to the purchased configuration in each product.
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.
