What Is OpenHands: A Self-Hosted Developer Agent Control Center
OpenHands Agent Canvas turns your coding agents into a self-hosted, always-on engineering team. It's a developer control center for starting conversations and automating everyday tasks-like generating reports that publish to Slack, or automatically decomposing GitHub issues into tasks. Runs locally by default, can connect to multiple agent backends (Docker/VM/cloud/enterprise infrastructure).
Core Highlights
- Self-host: local, Docker, VM, or anywhere you can run an agent server backend.
- Multi-backend switching: switch between local/remote/cloud agents without losing focus.
- Automations: integrate Slack, GitHub, Linear, etc., on schedule or webhook trigger.
- Bring your own model: any LLM.
- Use any agent: OpenHands, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or any ACP (Agent-Client Protocol) compatible agent.
How to Use
OpenHands runs the open-source OpenHands agent out of the box, and can use third-party agents like Claude Code/Codex.
- Local: by default local, data stays on your machine.
- Docker/VM backend: agents run in containers/VMs, isolated environment.
- OpenHands Cloud/Enterprise: optional cloud or enterprise.
Automation example: GitHub issue created -> OpenHands auto-decomposes tasks -> Slack notification.
Who It's For
- Dev teams: want self-hosted AI agents for daily automation (issue decomposition, report generation), data on-domain.
- Enterprise: enterprise-grade self-hosting, compliance + multi-backend.
- AI agent experimenters: one control center to run multiple agents (OpenHands/Claude Code/Codex) and compare.
vs. Devin/Cursor
Devin is hosted SaaS (closed-source); OpenHands is open-source self-hosted. Cursor is an in-IDE agent; OpenHands is a control center orchestrating multiple agents + automation.