Compare · last checked October 2026
Portia vs Devin
Devin takes tickets from Linear, Jira, GitHub or Slack into a cloud sandbox and returns a PR. MultiDevin fans one task across up to ten workers. It is hosted end to end and billed in compute units.
Devin, from Cognition, is a hosted agent. Give it a ticket from Linear, Jira, GitHub or Slack and it spins up a sandboxed environment, reads the codebase, plans, runs tests and opens a PR for review. MultiDevin puts a manager Devin over up to ten workers and merges the successful ones into one branch or PR. There is a CLI and a desktop app, and plans run from free through Pro, Max, Teams and Enterprise, billed in Agent Compute Units.
It is a different kind of product: a vendor's agent on a vendor's machines, with enterprise administration and a usage guarantee. The comparison is still worth making because the question is the same, how does a ticket become a reviewed PR, and the answers differ at every row.
Portia runs Claude Code on hardware you control, plans from the tracker with your approval, writes the acceptance specs before any feature work, and gates every child on its rebased head before it lands on the integration branch. The merge to main is yours.
| Portia | Devin | |
|---|---|---|
| Who proves the work is right, and when | The tests, written first and signed off by a person before any wave; then the gate on each child's rebased head; then you, at the one PR. | Its own tests in its sandbox; then you, in the PR. MultiDevin's manager merges the workers that passed. |
| Where rework shows up | At the gate, per child, before it lands: a failed exit gate retries with the failure in its brief. Siblings never touch the same file, so there is nothing to reconcile at the end. | In PR review, after the fact; MultiDevin reconciles its workers before you see them. |
| Unit of work | An epic, or a story big enough to split into children. | A task or ticket per Devin; MultiDevin fans one task across up to ten workers. |
| What you get back | One reviewed pull request for the whole feature, with a ledger of every child and the evidence for each scenario in its description. | A PR per Devin; MultiDevin merges its workers into one branch or PR. |
| Where the agents run | Your machine, or a build box you open over SSH. One git worktree per child. | Cognition's cloud sandboxes. |
| Which agents | Claude Code, on your own subscription. Workers follow the target repo's CLAUDE.md, skills and settings. | Devin. |
| Planning | A wave table drawn from the tickets and shown to you first. Written back into the tickets, with each dependency as a blocker link. | Its own; a manager Devin splits the work in MultiDevin. |
| Tests before features | The spine writes every acceptance scenario as a failing spec. You sign off before any wave starts. | Runs tests in its sandbox. |
| Isolation between tasks | A worktree, branch, port and database per child. No two children in a wave touch the same file. | A sandbox per Devin. |
| Gates before landing | Task gate; exit gate, run again on the rebased head; CI; an optional review of each child; the epic gate. | Your CI on the PR. |
| Who merges | You. Children squash-merge into an integration branch, pinned to the commit their gate passed. Portia never merges to main. | You. |
| Tracker | Jira or GitHub Issues. | Linear, Jira, GitHub, Slack. |
| Model choice | Per child, from its tier: a cheaper model for routine children, a stronger one for the hard ones. | Cognition's. |
| Spend and capacity | Caps per worker, per wave and per epic. Waves are sized from free memory and the other runs on the machine. | Agent Compute Units. Free, Pro ($20), Max ($200), Teams and Enterprise. |
| Unattended, and resuming | Parks with one question instead of guessing. Detached workers outlive the session, with a stall detector; portia resume picks a run back up. | Fully hosted. |
| Licence and price | Free. Source on GitHub. | Proprietary, hosted. |
What Devin does that Portia doesn't
- Hosted end to end: no machine of yours involved.
- Slack and ticket integrations across several trackers.
- Enterprise administration and a usage guarantee.
Choose Devin when
You want a hosted agent that takes tickets from a queue, and your team has budget for compute units.
Choose Portia when
You want the feature planned as one unit, tested first, with every child gated and the plan in your tickets, on hardware you control.
Questions
- Is MultiDevin the same as Portia's waves?
- It fans one task across workers and merges the survivors. Portia's waves are the ready children of a planned epic, each with its own ticket, worktree, port and database, landed one by one on an integration branch after their gates pass.
Sources
Devin's column comes from the pages below, read in October 2026. Portia's comes from its README and reference. If a cell is wrong, open an issue.