The 6 best Cognition AI alternatives in 2025

Cognition AI’s Devin certainly made an entrance, showing up with the title of "first AI software engineer." The demos are wild, showing an AI that can supposedly tackle an entire development project from a single prompt. The hype is definitely there, but so is the waitlist.

For now, Devin is stuck in a limited preview with no public price tag, which leaves a lot of us wondering what we’re supposed to do in the meantime. It’s also kicked off a bigger conversation: if an AI can be a software engineer, what other jobs can it do?

That’s why we’re digging into the best Cognition AI alternatives. We aren’t just looking for Devin copycats. We’re exploring a whole range of AI agents that are solving actual problems today, from open-source coding projects to autonomous agents that can clear out your customer support queue. Let’s find the right tool for the job you need done now.

AI software engineers and autonomous agents: The foundation of Cognition AI alternatives

At its heart, an AI software engineer like Devin is a type of autonomous agent. That’s really just a term for an AI that can work on its own. You give it a high-level goal, and it breaks down the steps to get there without you holding its hand.

For an AI software engineer, this means it can:

• Plan out all the tasks for a project.

• Write, debug, and test code that’s ready to go live.

• Use the same developer tools a person would, like a terminal or a web browser.

But the real potential here isn’t just about writing code. The same technology that powers Devin can be aimed at other complex, repetitive tasks in a business. Think about an AI agent that could act as a frontline support rep, an IT service desk manager, or an internal expert your team can just ask questions. The goal is the same: automate workflows so your team can get back to the more interesting, creative parts of their jobs.

How we picked the best Cognition AI alternatives

To get past the buzzwords, we put this list together based on what teams actually need from a tool. Here’s what we looked for:

• What’s it for? Is the tool designed for general coding, frontend work, or a totally different business area like customer support or IT service management?

• Can you even get it? Is it an open-source project you can play with, a freemium tool you can try today, or is it locked behind a sales demo and a hefty enterprise contract?

• How hard is the setup? How quickly can you get it working? We gave extra points to tools that don’t need a team of developers and a three-month onboarding project.

• Is it a specialist? Sometimes a tool that does one thing incredibly well is way more useful than a generalist tool that’s just okay at everything.

A quick comparison of the top Cognition AI alternatives

Here’s a brief look at how the top tools compare.

Tool	Best For	Key Feature	Pricing Model	Open Source?
eesel AI	Customer Support & IT Teams	Autonomous ticket resolution	Subscription (flat-rate)	No
Devika	Experimenting with AI coding	Open-source & community-driven	Free	Yes
OpenDevin	Collaborative AI development	Replicating Devin’s workflow	Free	Yes
Codeium	Individual developer productivity	AI-powered code autocompletion	Freemium	No
Cursor	AI-native development	AI-integrated code editor	Freemium	No
DhiWise	Frontend & app development	Design-to-code automation	Freemium	Yes (parts)

The 6 best Cognition AI alternatives to check out in 2025

While Devin is focused on writing code, there’s a whole world of AI agents ready to automate other parts of your business. Here are the top alternatives you can actually start using right now.

1. eesel AI

Devin is built to automate software engineering, but eesel AI is designed to automate customer engineering and support. It’s the best pick for teams who want an autonomous agent to handle frontline customer questions, resolve IT tickets, and serve as an internal expert for the whole company.

eesel AI connects directly to the tools you’re already using, like help desks (Zendesk, Freshdesk), chat platforms (Slack, MS Teams), and all your scattered knowledge. It learns from past tickets, help articles, and internal wikis in Confluence or Google Docs to give instant, accurate answers.

What we like:

• You can go live in minutes. It’s genuinely self-serve. You can sign up, connect your help desk, and build your first AI agent without talking to a single salesperson.

• Test it with your own data. The simulation mode is a killer feature. You can run the AI over thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how it would have answered, giving you a real forecast of your automation rate before you let it talk to customers.

eesel AI's simulation mode allows teams to test the AI agent on past tickets to forecast automation rates, a key feature for Cognition AI alternatives in a business context.

• It unifies all your knowledge. It doesn’t just look at your help desk. It can pull answers from messy Google Docs, old Confluence spaces, and recent Slack threads to give a complete picture.

• No-nonsense pricing. The price is a flat monthly or annual fee based on usage. No surprise per-ticket charges. You know exactly what you’ll pay, even when things get busy.

What to consider:

• It’s not a software development tool. eesel AI is laser-focused on customer support, ITSM, and internal knowledge management.

Pricing:

eesel AI’s plans include its Agent, Copilot, Triage, and Chatbot products.

• Team Plan: $299/month ($239/month billed annually) for up to 1,000 AI interactions.

• Business Plan: $799/month ($639/month billed annually) for up to 3,000 AI interactions, unlimited bots, and the ability to train on past tickets.

• Custom Plan: Custom pricing for unlimited interactions and other features.

2. Devika

If you’re hunting for a direct, open-source competitor to Devin, Devika is the one to watch. It was created to be a community-driven AI software engineer that anyone can use, tweak, and contribute to.

This video introduces Devika, an open-source AI software engineer and a notable name among Cognition AI alternatives.

Devika is an agentic AI built to take a high-level goal, figure out the steps, research what it needs, and then write the code to make it happen. It’s a great project for anyone who wants to get their hands dirty and see how these complex AI agents actually work.

What we like:

• It’s open-source. It’s completely free to use and modify, which is a huge benefit for hobbyists, students, and researchers.

• It’s community-driven. Development moves pretty fast thanks to a passionate global community of contributors.

• It’s transparent. You can dig into the code and see exactly how it thinks, which is impossible with closed-source tools like Devin.

What to consider:

• It’s highly experimental. As a new project, it can be buggy and doesn’t have the polish of a commercial product.

• The setup is tricky. You’ll need a bit of technical skill to get it installed and running on your own machine.

Pricing:

• Free (open-source).

3. OpenDevin

OpenDevin is another big open-source project trying to replicate the powerful skills Devin showed off. The project has since been renamed OpenHands.

It’s less of a single tool and more of a group effort to build, test, and improve autonomous AI agents. The project has a ton of community support and is focused on hitting the same benchmarks as Devin, giving developers a clear and ambitious target to work toward.

What we like:

• Strong community support. A huge group of developers and researchers are actively working on the project.

• Clear focus on replication. The goal is straightforward: match Devin’s performance on the SWE-Bench benchmark.

• It’s an extensible framework. It’s designed as a foundation that other developers can use to build their own specialized agents.

What to consider:

• This isn’t a production tool. It’s meant for research and experimentation, not for building your next product.

• You have to host it yourself. Like Devika, this isn’t a simple plug-and-play solution. You’ll need to set it up on your own.

Pricing:

• Free (open-source). The project also offers OpenHands Cloud with $20 in free credits for new users.

4. Codeium

Maybe you don’t need an AI to take over entire projects. If you just want to code faster, Codeium is a fantastic choice. It focuses on making individual developers more productive right inside their code editor.

Think of it as GitHub Copilot, but often faster and with a better free tier. Codeium provides snappy AI-powered code autocompletion, an in-editor chat for asking questions, and suggestions that understand the context of your code.

What we like:

• A very generous free tier. It’s free forever for individual developers, which is tough to argue with.

• It’s fast. Many users say its autocompletion feels quicker and less intrusive than competitors.

• Works with tons of IDEs. It supports more than 40 IDEs, so you can probably use it in your favorite editor.

What to consider:

• It’s an assistant, not an agent. Codeium helps you write code; it doesn’t write it for you. It won’t plan projects or finish tasks on its own.

• It’s not designed for complex, multi-step planning like an autonomous agent is.

Pricing:

• Free for individual developers. Paid plans are available for teams.

5. Cursor

Cursor takes a different path. Instead of adding AI features to an existing code editor, it built a code editor from the ground up with AI at its center. It’s a version of VS Code, so it feels familiar, but the AI is woven in much more deeply.

With Cursor, you can chat with your entire codebase, asking it to explain tricky functions, hunt for bugs, or refactor code across multiple files. It understands the context of your whole project, not just the single file you have open. This makes it incredibly useful for finding your way around large, unfamiliar codebases.

What we like:

• Deeply integrated AI. The AI isn’t just another feature; it’s a core part of the whole editing experience.

• Codebase-aware chat. Its ability to reason about your entire project is a huge help for complex tasks.

• Familiar feel. Since it’s built on VS Code, the learning curve is pretty flat for most developers.

What to consider:

• You have to switch editors. To get the full benefit, your team has to be willing to adopt Cursor as their main code editor.

• It’s still an assistant. It makes developers much more productive, but it doesn’t operate on its own.

Pricing:

• Hobby: Free, with limited requests.

• Pro: $20/month for more requests and unlimited Tab completions.

• Pro+: $60/month for 3x the usage on all models.

• Teams: Starts at $40/user/month and adds centralized billing and admin features.

6. DhiWise

DhiWise is a highly specialized AI agent that’s great at one of the most tedious parts of development: turning designs into code. This is the perfect Cognition AI alternative if your main slowdown is translating UI/UX mockups into a working frontend.

It automates web and mobile app development by taking your Figma designs and converting them into clean, production-ready code for frameworks like React and Flutter. It’s not a general-purpose coding agent, but for frontend teams, it can save a massive amount of time.

What we like:

• Amazing for frontend development. It can slash the time it takes to build UIs from days down to minutes.

• You have full control over the output. You get clean, readable code that you can actually work with, not some black box of generated files.

• It cuts out repetitive work. It frees up your developers from the mind-numbing task of pixel-pushing so they can focus on logic and features.

What to consider:

• It has a niche focus. It’s all about the frontend. It won’t help you with backend logic, APIs, or deployment.

• It’s not fully autonomous. It handles a very specific task in the development process, but it won’t manage the whole project.

Pricing:

• DhiWise has a freemium model. You can start building for free, and paid plans are available for more advanced features and bigger projects.

How to choose from the best Cognition AI alternatives for your team

With so many different kinds of AI agents out there, the right choice really boils down to the problem you’re trying to solve.

If you want to automate software projects from start to finish, you’re still in the experimental zone. The best thing to do is start with open-source options like Devika or OpenDevin. They’ll give you a sense of what’s possible (and what isn’t) without any cost. For tools you can rely on in production, you’ll probably have to wait for Devin to become widely available.

If you’re a developer who just wants to speed up your day-to-day coding, a fully autonomous agent is probably overkill. A more practical choice is an AI assistant like Codeium for its excellent autocompletion or Cursor for its deep, codebase-aware editing.

But if your team is drowning in repetitive customer support tickets or IT requests, a coding bot isn’t going to help. This is where a specialized business agent is the answer. A platform like eesel AI is built specifically to solve this problem, plugging into your existing workflows to provide immediate help and a clear return.

The future of Cognition AI alternatives: Autonomous vs. practical AI today

Fully autonomous AI software engineers like Devin show an exciting future, but they’re still on the horizon. For most of us, the technology is still in the experimental phase.

The good news is that practical, business-focused AI agents are already here and delivering real results. The best "alternative" to Cognition AI isn’t always a tool that writes code; it’s a tool that solves your most pressing, repetitive, and time-consuming problem. For teams buried in support queues and internal questions, the answer isn’t a coding bot, it’s a support bot.

Ready to see how an AI agent can change your support workflows? Try eesel AI for free and build your first autonomous support agent in minutes.