Nori vs Factory Droids

Quick answer

Both ship their own agent: Factory builds Droid, Nori ships Jiro. Pick Factory if you have standardized on Droid, want a $20 entry plan, or can negotiate its air-gapped deployment and live without Slack and cloud sync there. Pick Nori if you want Jiro or any harness, Droid included, working for the whole team from Slack, schedules and webhooks, with shared memories and skillsets, on your own Claude or ChatGPT subscription, keys or gateway, with flat plans and no token charges.

What is Factory?

Factory builds Droid, a coding agent that developers run from a CLI and a desktop app, and that Factory also hosts on its web and mobile platforms. It is aimed at engineering organizations that want one agent from individual developers up to large teams.

As of November 2026, Factory's own pages establish three things that matter for this comparison:

• Plans. Pro is $20 per month, Plus is $100 per month and Max is $200 per month. Teams is $60 per month plus $40 per seat. See Factory pricing.
• Bring your own key. Personal custom-model BYOK applies to the Droid CLI and desktop app, not to Factory's hosted web and mobile platforms. See the BYOK documentation.
• Deployment. The default Private deployment retains Factory's hosted control. A negotiated air-gapped deployment exists, and it excludes Slack and cloud sync. See network and deployment and air-gapped deployment.

Factory's current usage limits, single sign-on tiers and automation triggers were not re-read for this November update, so this page treats them as not documented rather than repeating older figures.

What is Nori?

Nori is a cloud platform for coding agents, built for engineering teams. The whole team drives it from Slack, Discord, the web or the CLI. Cron schedules, one-time reminders and webhooks start the same kind of session a person would start, with run history and approval paths. Every session begins with the team's shared memories and org skillset, so the agent already knows how you ship.

Each session is an isolated cloud sandbox running the harness you choose: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, OpenCode, Amp, any ACP agent, or Factory's own Droid. You connect your own Claude or ChatGPT subscription, API keys or any LLM gateway, and those credentials are what the cloud sessions use. Nori never charges for tokens.

Meet Jiro

Jiro is the AI engineering teammate that Nori ships, and the Nori counterpart to Droid. It runs on Claude Code or Codex under the hood, on your own subscription or API key. It follows an opinionated engineering workflow: plan, write the failing test, implement, review. On its first day it reads your repositories, asks the team how you ship and sets up the workspace. See jiro.bot.

A typical request looks like this:

#platform-eng
@Jiro bump `openssl` in services/gateway/Dockerfile to the patched release,
run the integration suite, and open a PR.

Jiro: Plan posted in thread. Image rebuilt, 186 integration tests passed.
PR: chore(gateway): bump openssl base image
Ready for review.

Nori vs Factory Droids, head to head

The API key row is the one teams trip over. An engineer can point Droid on a laptop at a custom model with a personal key. Factory's documentation says that does not extend to its hosted web and mobile platforms. On Nori, the subscription, key or gateway you connect is what the cloud session uses, so a background job at 02:00 runs on the same model contract as the engineer at a desk. See do cloud coding agents mark up token costs.

Enterprise deployment: where does the control plane run?

The control plane is the part that orchestrates sessions, holds transcripts and organization state, and runs the agent loop. It is a different question from where the code executes. For background, see what an agent control plane is.

Factory documents two shapes. Its default Private deployment retains hosted control: Factory still runs the control side. Its air-gapped deployment is negotiated, and Factory's documentation says it excludes Slack and cloud sync, so a team that works in Slack threads changes how it works when it moves there.

Nori Enterprise deploys the full stack, control plane included, into your own AWS VPC or Azure VNet, or on-prem, with your identity provider (SAML, SCIM, OIDC), LLM gateway and 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.

If your requirement is a customer-hosted control plane in general, read vendor boundaries closely. Coder, for example, offers a customer-hosted agent control plane, and its documentation notes that self-hosting is not automatically air-gapped because usage reporting has an outbound endpoint. Ask every vendor the same three questions: where does the agent loop run, where are transcripts stored, and what calls leave the network?

When to choose Factory

• You have standardized on Droid and want its maker to host it. One vendor builds the agent and runs the platform.
• You want the cheapest way in. Factory Pro is $20 per month. Nori's paid plans start at $99 per month after a 30-day free trial.
• You price by seat. Factory Teams is $60 per month plus $40 per seat, which is simple to forecast for a small group of regular users.
• Your developers mostly work at the keyboard. Droid's CLI and desktop app accept personal custom-model keys.
• You can negotiate the air-gapped deployment and do not need Slack there. Factory documents that option, with Slack and cloud sync excluded.

When to choose Nori

• The whole team should share one agent setup. Requests from Slack, cron schedules and webhooks all start the same sessions, with the same shared memories and skillset.
• Your engineers use different agents. Nori runs Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and ACP agents side by side, Droid among them.
• You already pay for Claude or ChatGPT. Nori uses those subscriptions directly and never charges for tokens.
• You want your own keys in the cloud, not only on laptops. On Nori, your keys or gateway power every cloud session.
• You need Slack and a private deployment together. Nori Enterprise runs the full stack in your environment and the team keeps working from chat.
• You want unlimited members. Nori Team is priced by machines, not seats, so product managers and support leads can ask for work without a seat each.
• Your team uses Discord. Nori is driven from Discord as well as Slack.

How to switch from Factory to Nori

1. Inventory your recurring work. For each job, note the trigger, the prompt and the repository.
2. Start the Nori trial. Thirty days, no card.
3. Keep Droid if you like it. Droid runs on Nori as a harness, so you can change platforms before you decide whether to change agents. Try Jiro on the same tickets and compare.
4. Connect models. Sign in with a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, or add the API keys or gateway you already use with Droid.
5. Move conventions into the org skillset. An AGENTS.md rule such as "run make lint test before every push" goes into the skillset once and applies to every session. Facts about the codebase become shared memories.
6. Recreate recurring work as automations. Schedules become cron automations like the one below. Events become webhook automations pointed at the event source.
7. Run both for a week. Connect Slack or Discord, give both tools the same five tickets, and compare the pull requests before you cut over.

schedule: 30 6 * * 1
agent: droid
repo: acme/gateway
prompt: Update minor and patch dependencies in go.mod.
        Run `make lint test`. Open one PR and post the link in #platform-eng.

For other options, see cloud coding agents compared, Nori vs Devin and Nori vs Warp Factories. To see Nori 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.

• Factory: Pricing
• Factory docs: Bring your own key
• Factory docs: Enterprise network and deployment
• Factory docs: Air-gapped deployment
• Coder docs: Agent licensing and usage reporting
• Jiro, the agent Nori ships