Restless vs OpenHands.
OpenHands is a self-hosted control centre for coding agents. Restless is a self-hosted office for a whole company's work, code included. Close cousins, different jobs.
OpenHands and Restless are probably the most alike technically: both are open source, both self-hosted, both run agents in sandboxed Docker environments and both happily drive Claude Code and Codex. The difference is scope. OpenHands is built for developers. Restless is built for a company.
What OpenHands is
OpenHands (now branded Agent Canvas) calls itself the self-hosted developer control centre for coding agents and automations. It runs its own open-source agent plus third-party ones like Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI, from one browser UI.
You install the CLI with npm and open the UI locally, or run it from source or Docker, with each conversation in its own Docker sandbox. Agents can run locally, on VMs, on your company's infrastructure or on OpenHands Cloud and Enterprise. It works with any model you bring, and it's built around engineering work: coding conversations, splitting GitHub issues into tasks, managing code review, and scheduled or webhook-triggered automations. It's MIT licensed.
Where OpenHands is great
OpenHands is the better pick if you want:
- One place for a dev team to run and manage lots of coding agents.
- Tight GitHub workflows: issues into tasks, code review, automations on webhooks.
- Flexibility on where agents run, from your laptop to company infrastructure.
- A mature, popular open-source project focused purely on software.
Where Restless is different
Restless treats software as one kind of company work among many.
- Beyond code. Proposals, research, store pages, documents and builds all live in the same company, with the same owners and review.
- Non-engineers in the room. Your designer, writer or cofounder edits documents live, comments and makes calls alongside the agents.
- A persistent company computer. One lasting Linux machine per company that keeps its files, tools and browser state between sessions, rather than a sandbox per conversation.
- Organisation that survives restarts. Goals, accountable leads and work history live outside any single agent session.
- Attention as the budget. Routine coordination stays quiet. You get prepared decisions, not a feed of agent activity.
Honest trade-offs
For pure software engineering, OpenHands is more mature, more focused and has deeper GitHub integration. Restless is a development preview and doesn't try to be the best coding-agent console. If your team is all engineers shipping code, OpenHands is probably the better fit.