Nori vs Amp Orbs

Quick answer

It depends, and the two are closer than most pairs: both Nori and Amp let you reuse your own subscriptions or keys and charge no token fees. Choose Amp if you want Amp's own agent, a $20 Individual plan with 45,000 hosted-Orb minutes, and per-minute machines. Choose Nori if you want a team workspace: Jiro, Nori's own AI engineering teammate, or any harness (Amp included), driven from Slack or Discord, with flat plans, shared skillsets and memories, and a full stack you can deploy in your own cloud.

What is Amp?

Amp is a coding agent, and Orbs are its cloud machines: places where Amp's agent runs without your laptop. Sourcegraph's November 9, 2026 notice about the end of Cody confirms that Amp is independent of Sourcegraph. This page compares Amp Orbs with Nori, as of November 2026, using Amp's pricing page and documentation.

• Plans. Amp's pricing page lists Hobby as a free subscription and Individual at $20 per month with 45,000 hosted-Orb minutes. The team layer adds no charge.
• No token fees. The same page documents bring-your-own-key and subscription reuse, with no Amp token fees.
• Per-minute machines. Orbs are priced per minute. The rate for each size is on Amp's sizes and costs page.
• Your own runners. Amp documents running Orbs on your own runners for enterprise customers. Billing for those runners changes on November 13, 2026, so read the sizes and costs page for the current terms before you budget.
• Scheduled threads. Amp's automations docs describe schedules that resume the same thread, so a recurring job keeps its conversation.

Amp is a good fit for developers who like Amp's agent and want it to keep working in the cloud.

What is Nori?

Nori is a cloud platform for coding agents, built for engineering teams. People start and steer sessions from Slack, Discord, the web or the CLI. Cron schedules, one-time reminders and webhooks start the same kind of session, with run history and approval paths. Projects give long-running work a coordinator, shared docs and subworkers.

Each session runs in an isolated cloud sandbox with your repositories, your team's skillset and scoped credentials. Nori runs any agent harness: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, OpenCode, Droid, Amp, or any ACP agent. You connect your own Claude or ChatGPT subscription, API keys or LLM gateway, and Nori never charges for tokens. Every session starts with the same org skillset (AGENTS.md, skills, subagents) and shared memories.

Meet Jiro

Jiro is Nori's own AI engineering teammate, the Nori counterpart to Amp's own agent. Jiro runs on the subscription or API key you connect, so there are no token charges. It follows an opinionated engineering workflow: plan, write the test first, implement, review. On its first day it reads your repositories, asks the team how you ship, and sets up the workspace. See jiro.bot.

Nori vs Amp Orbs, head to head

Where Amp and Nori agree

On pricing philosophy, Amp is the closest product to Nori. Both let you pay your model provider directly, through a subscription you already hold or your own keys, and neither adds a token fee on top. Neither company earns more when your agent burns more tokens. If token pricing were your only test, the two would be roughly even. For how other vendors handle this, see do cloud coding agents mark up token costs.

So the decision comes down to four other things: which harness you want, how you want to pay for machines, who on the team starts the work, and where the control plane runs.

Per-minute versus flat pricing: a worked example

The two pricing shapes reward different usage. Here is how to work out which one suits you. The usage figures are an illustration, not a benchmark.

1. Count machine-minutes. Suppose one developer runs an agent for about 90 minutes on each of 20 working days. That is 1,800 minutes a month, well inside the 45,000 hosted-Orb minutes in Amp's $20 Individual plan.
2. Count people and parallel tasks. Now suppose a 12-person team, where product and support staff also start tasks, keeps five tasks running at once through the working day and runs four scheduled jobs overnight.
3. Price each shape. On Amp, add up the per-minute rate for the Orb sizes you use, from the sizes and costs page. On Nori, the Team plan is $250 per month for five machines with unlimited members, and the number does not move with minutes.
4. Add the model bill, which is the same on both. Either way you pay your model provider directly.

A light individual user usually comes out cheaper on Amp. A team that wants a number finance can approve once, with any number of members, usually prefers the flat plan. A scheduled job on Nori looks like this:

Schedule: 0 2 * * *   (every night, 02:00)
Prompt:   Run the integration suite for checkout-service against staging.
          For each new failure, open an issue with the failing test and the suspect commit.
          Post a summary in #checkout-eng.
Approval: none (read-only job, no merges).

Enterprise deployment: where does the control plane run?

The control plane is the service that decides who may start a session, hands out credentials and keeps the record. See what an agent control plane is.

Amp documents your own runners for enterprise customers, which moves the machine that executes the work onto your side. The pages we read do not document a control plane you host yourself. Treat that as unknown and ask Amp if your security team requires it.

Nori Enterprise deploys the full stack, control plane included, into your own AWS VPC or Azure VNet, or on-prem. It uses your identity provider (SAML, SCIM, OIDC), your LLM gateway and your compute. On hosted plans, Nori gives each organization a dedicated, single-tenant control plane and data store, and every session runs in its own isolated sandbox.

When to choose Amp

• You like Amp's agent and want it in the cloud. Orbs are built for exactly that.
• You want a low entry price. Hobby is free and Individual is $20 per month with 45,000 hosted-Orb minutes. Nori's Developer plan is $99 per month after a 30-day free trial.
• Your usage is bursty. Per-minute pricing suits a person who runs agents some days and not others.
• You want a recurring job to keep one conversation. Amp schedules resume the same thread.
• You are an individual or a small team. The team layer adds no charge on top of each person's plan.

When to choose Nori

• The whole team asks for work. Product, support and data people start sessions from Slack or Discord and get a pull request back.
• You want a ready-to-work AI engineer. Jiro plans, works test-first and reviews its own changes, in the thread where the request was made.
• Your engineers use more than one agent. Nori runs Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and any ACP agent in one workspace, Amp included.
• Finance wants a flat bill. Team starts at $250 per month for five machines with unlimited members, and it does not change with minutes used.
• You want shared context. Org skillsets and shared memories mean every session, on every harness, starts with how your team ships.
• You want webhooks and approvals next to schedules. Automations carry run history and approval paths.
• Security needs the control plane inside your boundary. Nori Enterprise runs in your cloud with your identity provider and LLM gateway.

How to switch from Amp to Nori

1. List what runs in Orbs today. Write down each scheduled thread with its timing and prompt, and note which repositories each one touches.
2. Start the 30-day free trial. No card is needed.
3. Connect the same model accounts. Use the same subscription or API keys you already use with Amp, or add your LLM gateway.
4. Pick a harness. Keep Amp as your harness inside Nori if you like it, or try Jiro, Claude Code or Codex next to it.
5. Recreate scheduled threads as automations. Each schedule becomes a cron automation. Jobs that should react to an event become webhooks. See scheduled coding agents.
6. Move team conventions into an org skillset so every session starts with them.
7. Install Nori in Slack or Discord and run both tools on the same few tickets for a week before you cut over.

For the wider field, see cloud coding agents compared, Nori vs Factory or Nori vs Cursor cloud agents. To see it on your own repositories, book a demo.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Competitor facts were read from these vendor pages on November 11, 2026. Vendors change plans and features often; check the source before you decide.

• Amp: Pricing (plans, subscription reuse, no token fees)
• Amp docs: Orb sizes and costs (per-minute pricing, own-runner billing)
• Amp docs: Orb automations (schedules resume the same thread)
• Sourcegraph blog: Sunsetting Cody (confirms Amp's independence)
• Claude: Pricing (subscriptions Nori can reuse)
• OpenAI: ChatGPT pricing (subscriptions Nori can reuse)