OpenHands
Shares rank 37 of 41 coding agents by recommenders
Free, MIT-licensed open-source AI coding agent that works with any model. Critics call its container-per-agent design heavy.
Free, MIT-licensed open-source AI coding agent that works with any model. Critics call its container-per-agent design heavy.
10 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 60%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Free, open-source, MIT licensed
“OpenHands is delivering powerful coding agents for every developer, for free, forever.”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “OpenHands Raises $18.8M to Build an Open Standard for Autonomous Dev” “MIT license and model agnostic”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “Agentic AI Foundation” “fully OSS and LLM-agnostic”
Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file” Works with any LLM
“MIT license and model agnostic”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “Agentic AI Foundation” “fully OSS and LLM-agnostic”
Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file” Outperforms cloud models on speed and cost
“open-source models like OpenHands outperformed cloud-hosted Claude alternatives in terms of 95th percentile latency”
Comment from 9 Aug 2026 in “Launch HN: Tokenless (YC S26) – Automatic model switching to save money” “outperforms Claude Code on both cost and accuracy”
Comment from 20 Jul 2026 in “Stop Using OpenCode”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Heavy Docker container setup
“begrudging all of the docker infrastructure ... and all of the emojis”
Comment from 1 Oct 2026 in “Pi 1.0” “your OpenHands concept with container per agent seem little heavy”
Comment from 16 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: Paca – Lightweight Jira alternative for human-AI collaboration”
Other coding agents people recommend
The four most recommended other coding agents, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | 571 | 993 | 37% | 12 | 1 yr46 owners | — |
| oh-my-pi | 104 | 28 | 79% | 9 | 2 mo5 owners | Approved |
| Grok Build CLI | 66 | 114 | 37% | 6 | — | — |
| DeepSeek Harness | 63 | 28 | 69% | 4 | 1 mo5 owners | Approved |
| OpenHandsThis page | 6 | 4 | 60% | 8 | — | — |
What people said
All 13 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“begrudging all of the docker infrastructure ... and all of the emojis”
“open-source models like OpenHands outperformed cloud-hosted Claude alternatives in terms of 95th percentile latency”
“outperforms Claude Code on both cost and accuracy”
“your OpenHands concept with container per agent seem little heavy”
“Kinda clunky, limited, poor design.”
“no agent (CC, Codex, OpenHands) was smart enough to figure out my layout unguided”
“Here's two popular open-source projects that have combined 200k+ stars”
“looks like it's similar to what you want”
“Got rid of openhands in favor of Shelley”
“fully OSS and LLM-agnostic”
“MIT license and model agnostic”
“Local inference for real coding agents (not just autocomplete)”
“OpenHands is delivering powerful coding agents for every developer, for free, forever.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.