OpenCode vs OpenHands

When to pick OpenCode

• You want a fixed monthly bill rather than an open-ended token meter. Go is $10/month with per-model limits published in dollars — up to $12 per 5 hours, $30 weekly, $60 monthly on most models — so a long session cannot quietly become a large invoice.
• You already pay for models elsewhere. OpenCode reaches 75+ providers through Models.dev, runs local models, and accepts an existing GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT Plus/Pro login, so the agent costs nothing extra.
• You live in the terminal and want breadth of surfaces around it: a TUI with build and plan agents switchable by keystroke, automatic LSP diagnostics fed to the model, multi-session parallelism, a browser extension, and a beta desktop app with tabs.

When to pick OpenHands

• The work should continue without you. Cloud sandboxes keep agents running when your local machine is offline, which no local-first CLI can replicate.
• Your workflow is issue-to-pull-request. OpenHands opens and reviews PRs with quality and security checks, runs vulnerability scanning with reviewable fixes, and wires into Jira and Slack — OpenCode has no built-in PR review at all.
• You want a real GUI. The web interface sits alongside a terminal UI and CLI, so non-terminal teammates can drive the same agent.

Bottom line

Both are MIT-licensed, model-agnostic, and free to run on your own keys, so the split is about where the agent lives. OpenCode is the better fit for an individual developer who works in a terminal and wants spend certainty: the $10 Go plan is genuinely flat, the project is extremely active with over 187,000 GitHub stars, and nothing about your code is stored by the vendor. OpenHands is the better fit for a team treating the agent as infrastructure — hosted sandboxes, PR review, security scanning, and issue-tracker integrations, with model usage passed through at provider cost and no markup. Watch the ceilings on both: OpenHands’ free cloud tier stops at about 10 conversations a day for one user and team features jump straight to a custom Enterprise quote, while OpenCode’s bring-your-own-key billing is unbounded outside the Go plan — a long session on Claude Opus 4.8 at $5.00 input and $25.00 output per 1M tokens escalates quickly. Neither publishes a per-seat enterprise rate.