Nori vs OpenHands

Quick answer

It depends on who should operate the system. Choose OpenHands if you want free, MIT-licensed software you run yourself: its self-hosted Agent Canvas supports external agents, your own model keys and automations. Choose Nori if you want that team workflow operated for you: Jiro or any harness in Slack, schedules and webhooks, shared memories and skillsets, on the Claude or ChatGPT subscription you already pay for, with no token charges.

What is OpenHands?

OpenHands is an open-source coding agent project. As of November 2026 its pricing page lists two things a team will care about.

• Agent Canvas, free and self-hosted. It is MIT licensed, you run it on your own machines, and it supports external agents, bring-your-own model keys (BYOK) and automations.
• OpenHands Teams, paid. $500 per month for ten users, plus $50 per added seat, capped at 5,000 sessions per month.

OpenHands also documents a Slack integration. If you self-host, the Slack docs say your installation needs a publicly reachable HTTPS address so Slack can deliver events to it.

Two claims from our October page are retired. OpenHands Teams is no longer priced at $499 or $999, and external agents are not limited to paid plans: the free Agent Canvas supports them.

What is Nori?

Nori is a cloud platform for coding agents, built for engineering teams. Someone writes @nori the CSV export drops rows with a null region, fix it and add a test in a Slack thread. Nori starts an isolated cloud sandbox with the team's repositories, skillset and scoped credentials, the agent does the work, and a pull request link comes back in the thread. The same sessions start from Discord, the web, the CLI, cron schedules, one-time reminders and webhooks, and they all share one run history.

Every session starts with your organization's shared context: skillsets (CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, skills and subagents), shared memories, custom agents per team, and integrations scoped to the organization, a person or an agent. Nori runs any harness (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, OpenCode, Droid, Amp or any ACP agent) on your own Claude or ChatGPT subscription, API keys or LLM gateway, and never charges for tokens.

Meet Jiro

Jiro is the AI engineering teammate that Nori ships, ready to work on day one. It runs on Claude Code or Codex with your own subscription or key, and it follows an engineering workflow of planning, test-driven development and review. In its first days it reads your repositories, asks the team how you ship, and sets up the workspace. See jiro.bot.

Nori vs OpenHands, head to head

"Not documented" means the two OpenHands pages we read do not establish it. It does not mean OpenHands lacks it. Ask the vendor before you rule anything out.

Enterprise deployment: where does the control plane run?

The control plane is the service that decides who may start a session, which credentials it gets, where it runs and what is kept afterwards. See what an agent control plane is for the full breakdown.

OpenHands gives you the most direct answer a vendor can give: Agent Canvas is free, MIT licensed and self-hosted, so the control plane is wherever you install it. The cost is that you are the operator. You patch it, size the machines, rotate credentials, and expose an HTTPS endpoint to the internet if you want Slack.

Nori 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), 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.

OpenHands is not the only self-hosted option, and you should compare it with the others. As of November 2026, Coder offers a customer-hosted agent control plane and workspaces with a free Community edition, though its licensing docs note that usage reporting has an outbound endpoint, so self-hosting is not automatically air-gapped. OpenClaw runs an operator-owned gateway with shared team sessions and cron, where one gateway is one trust domain.

What the same job looks like in each

Take one recurring job: every weekday at 07:00, check the payments-api repository for failing dependency updates and open a pull request with the fix.

On self-hosted OpenHands, you would install Agent Canvas on a machine you own, add a model key, create the automation there, and keep that machine patched and reachable. That work is yours, and so is every choice about how it runs.

On Nori, you ask for it in Slack and the automation is saved with this shape:

name:      payments-api dependency check
schedule:  0 7 * * 1-5   (America/New_York)
agent:     Jiro
repos:     acme/payments-api
prompt:    Run the dependency update check. If a bump breaks tests,
           fix it and open a PR. Post a summary in #payments-eng.
deliver:   Slack #payments-eng

At 07:00 Nori claims a fresh sandbox, installs the team skillset, runs Jiro on the team's Claude subscription, and posts the pull request link in #payments-eng. A reviewer replies in the thread and the same session picks up the comment. See scheduled coding agents for the details.

When to choose OpenHands

• You need the source. Agent Canvas is MIT licensed. You can read it, fork it and change it. Nori is not open source at that level, and for some compliance or research needs that settles the question.
• You want to pay nothing for software. If you have engineers to operate it, the free self-hosted Agent Canvas costs you only your model bill and your machines.
• You already run internal platforms. A team with an on-call rotation, an ingress controller and a secrets manager can absorb one more service, including the public HTTPS endpoint Slack needs.
• Your usage fits the Teams plan. Ten users at $500 per month, under 5,000 sessions per month, with OpenHands as the vendor, is a clear and published offer.

When to choose Nori

• You want the whole team workflow without operating it. Slack and Discord, schedules and webhooks, shared memories and skillsets, and projects for long-running work arrive together, already wired to each other.
• You already pay for Claude or ChatGPT. Nori runs agents on those subscriptions, on API keys or on your gateway, and never charges for tokens.
• You want a teammate, not a toolkit. Jiro plans, works test-first and reviews its own changes from the first session.
• You want pricing by machine, not by seat or session. Team starts at $250 per month for five machines with unlimited members. A 30-person team where six people work with agents at once does not pay for 30 seats.
• Security wants it inside your cloud, with a vendor accountable for it. Nori Enterprise runs in your VPC or VNet with SAML and SCIM from your identity provider.

Not sure a team platform is needed at all? Read Nori vs Claude Code, or see all the options in cloud coding agents compared.

How to switch from OpenHands to Nori

1. List what OpenHands does today. Write down each automation with its trigger and prompt, each external agent you configured, and the model keys in use.
2. Start the Nori trial. Thirty days, no card. Pick the Developer or Team plan.
3. Connect models. Sign in with your Claude or ChatGPT subscription, or reuse the same API key or gateway you gave OpenHands.
4. Pick the agent. Start with Jiro, or run the same external agent you used in Agent Canvas, such as Claude Code or Codex.
5. Move your context. Put repository instructions into the org skillset as AGENTS.md and skills, and save standing facts ("staging deploys need the deploy-staging label") as shared memories.
6. Recreate automations. Each scheduled job becomes a cron automation; each event-driven job becomes a webhook automation. See turning a Sentry webhook into a fix PR for a worked example.
7. Connect Slack. Install the Nori Slack app. You can then retire the public HTTPS endpoint your self-hosted install exposed for Slack.
8. Run both for a week. Give both systems the same five tickets, compare the pull requests, then shut down the one you are not keeping.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

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

• OpenHands pricing (Agent Canvas, Teams plan, session cap)
• OpenHands docs: Slack integration
• Coder pricing
• Coder docs: agent licensing and usage
• OpenClaw docs: architecture