open-swe vs symphony
symphony is much bigger: 27.2k stars against 10.7k. Over the days we have tracked them open-swe moved +7.5% and symphony +7.3%, so open-swe is growing faster right now.
open-swe leads on context depth and customization and model freedom. symphony does not take any axis by a clear margin.
Stars and commit dates come from our own daily tracking. The six axes are read off each project's documentation by our review pipeline, so they describe what a project says about itself, not what we measured in its code.
Where they stand today
Provides pluggable isolated cloud sandboxes and subagent orchestration out of the box for safe, parallelized repo edits and automatic PR creation.
- Stars
- 10.7k
- Tracked growth
- +7.5%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 2h ago
- Language
- Python
- License
- MIT
- Cost to run
- Your API key + cloud sandbox costs
Orchestrates isolated, autonomous implementation runs so teams manage work instead of supervising individual coding agents.
- Stars
- 27.2k
- Tracked growth
- +7.3%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 4d ago
- Language
- Elixir
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Cost to run
- Self-hosted — runs on your infrastructure
Six axes, head to head
Each axis runs 0 to 5. The label under a score is what that project's own docs claim, not a category average.
| Axis | open-swe | symphony |
|---|---|---|
Context depth How much of your codebase it sees before it answers: the open diff, the diff plus related files, or the whole repository. | ●●●●● Whole-repo access | ●●●●● Diff + related files |
Noise control How it keeps output volume down — severity thresholds, deduplication, incremental runs over new commits only. | ●●●●● Basic filters & middleware | ●●●●● Human acceptance gating |
Customization How far it bends to your team: custom rules, prompts, style guides, per-path config. | ●●●●● Highly customizable | ●●●●● Minimal config |
Privacy Whether your code stays on your own infrastructure: fully local, self-hostable, or cloud API only. | ●●●●● Cloud APIs (your key) | ●●●●● Self-hostable |
Model freedom Whether you can point it at any provider, or it is wired to one. | ●●●●● Bring-your-own-key | ●●●●● Fixed provider |
Setup ease What it takes to get a first useful run out of it. | ●●●●● Multi-service setup | ●●●●● Manual setup required |
Which one to pick
Pick open-swe if…
Customizable architecture — swap sandboxes, models, tools, and middleware to build an internal coding agent that runs each task in an isolated cloud sandbox and opens PRs automatically.
- Context depth: Whole-repo access (5/5 against 3/5)
- Customization: Highly customizable (5/5 against 2/5)
- Model freedom: Bring-your-own-key (5/5 against 1/5)
Pick symphony if…
Self-hostable — use Symphony when you want an on-prem orchestration that spawns isolated agent runs, produces PRs and CI proof-of-work, and reduces hands-on agent supervision.
What people want from each one
langchain-ai/open-swe
Hacker News: An Open-Source Asynchronous Coding Agent drew 5 points and 0 comments.
openai/symphony
Hacker News: Show HN: Symphony – Use GPT-4 to call functions in sequence drew 93 points and 33 comments.
Questions people ask
Is open-swe better than symphony?
open-swe leads on context depth and customization and model freedom. symphony does not take any axis by a clear margin. open-swe is worth picking when customizable architecture — swap sandboxes, models, tools, and middleware to build an internal coding agent that runs each task in an isolated cloud sandbox and opens PRs automatically.
Which of open-swe and symphony keeps my code private?
open-swe: Cloud APIs (your key) (3/5). symphony: Self-hostable (4/5).
What does each one cost to run?
open-swe: Your API key + cloud sandbox costs. symphony: Self-hosted — runs on your infrastructure.
Full profiles: langchain-ai/open-swe and openai/symphony. Everything else in Autonomous SWE agents.