Cosyra vs Gitpod (Ona): Mobile Cloud Dev in 2026

Short answer. Gitpod rebranded to Ona on 2025-09-02 and re-centered the product on autonomous background agents — "task in, pull request out." It still ships browser VS Code underneath, it bills on a credit meter (OCUs), and it has never shipped a native mobile app on any store (the iPad request, gitpod-io/gitpod#850, has been open since 2019). We built Cosyra for a different job: a managed mobile cloud terminal with native iOS and Android apps backed by a persistent Ubuntu 24.04 x86_64 container on Azure, with Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, and Gemini CLI pre-installed. If your goal is async "task in, PR out" with enterprise governance, Ona is the right pick. If your goal is to drive an AI coding agent yourself from your phone on the train, the couch, or the school pickup line, we think Cosyra is the better fit.

We wrote this after spending a Saturday on a couch with an iPad, a Pixel 8, and a MacBook, trying both products against the same real task: open a TypeScript repo, ask an AI agent to refactor a small function, and ship the diff. Ona on iPad Safari opened the workspace and the Code OSS shell rendered, but actually editing in the desktop-browser UI on a touchscreen fought us at every step. Cosyra's iOS app handled the same task in a single sit-down. We will show you exactly what we hit, and we will be honest about the parts of Ona we cannot match.

This post was written by the Cosyra team. We compared Cosyra against Gitpod (Ona) based on hands-on testing of both, first-hand reads of ona.com, ona.com/pricing, and ona.com/stories/gitpod-is-now-ona (all re-fetched 2026-05-31), the gitpod.io → ona.com 308 redirect verified by curl, GitHub issues gitpod-io/gitpod#850 and #6447 re-checked via gh api on 2026-05-31, and our internal factsheet at .claude/growth/competitor-facts/gitpod.md. Anything claimed below about Ona's status, pricing, or mobile situation traces back to those sources.

Gitpod is now Ona: what changed, and what stayed the same

On 2025-09-02 the company shipped a single rebrand post titled "Gitpod is now Ona: your AI software engineer," and pointed the marketing domain at ona.com. The strapline became "The platform for background agents." We re-verified the change first-hand on 2026-05-31: curl -sI https://www.gitpod.io returns HTTP/2 308 with location: https://ona.com. The sign-in page still lives at app.gitpod.io. The browser VS Code IDE still works. The official rebrand story is blunt about why: "IDEs defined the last era. Agents define the next. As the work of programming moves from typing to product taste, decision making, and review, everything about how we create software changes."

The important nuance, and the one that almost every "Ona alternative" listicle gets wrong, is that this is a rebrand and re-centering, not a shutdown. Ona is not Firebase Studio. There is no sunset date. The browser VS Code IDE still ships underneath the agent layer. What changed is the headline: Ona's marketing now talks about autonomous background agents, "task in, pull request out," parallel agents per environment, the Ona Guardrails enterprise control plane. The IDE is still there if you want it; it is no longer the product they are selling.

Three Ona components matter for any comparison. Ona Environments are sandboxed dev envs configured by devcontainer.json + automations.yml. Ona Agents are the autonomous AI collaborators that run inside those environments. Ona Guardrails is the enterprise control plane: RBAC, SSO/OIDC, audit trails, command-level controls, self-hosted VPC. All of that is real, all of it works, and none of it overlaps with what Cosyra ships. We pre-install four CLIs and hand you a terminal; they orchestrate autonomous agents and hand you a dashboard.

How do Cosyra and Gitpod (Ona) compare feature by feature?

Cosyra is a managed mobile cloud terminal with native iOS and Android apps backed by a persistent Ubuntu 24.04 x86_64 container on Azure AKS, with four AI coding CLIs pre-installed and $29.99/month pricing after a 1-hour-on-signup free tier plus an opt-in 10-hour, 7-day trial. Gitpod (now Ona) is a browser-based cloud development environment that pivoted to an autonomous background-agent platform, billed via OCU credits, with browser VS Code underneath and no native mobile app on any store. The table below lines them up on twelve attributes, re-verified 2026-05-31 against the official pricing page, the rebrand story, and live GitHub issues.

Quick read of the table: if you only look at the cloud-IDE rows (storage, OS support, compute), Cosyra and Ona look like rival CDEs. Look at the AI workflow row and they diverge completely. Ona's center of gravity is async autonomous agents working through a dashboard while you do something else. Ours is interactive CLIs you drive yourself from a terminal on a phone. The right pick depends on which side of that workflow split your day-to-day actually lives on.

What happens when you run the same workload on Cosyra and Ona?

We picked a 3,000-line TypeScript project we already had on GitHub, asked an agent to find a retry-backoff function and add jitter, and tried to ship the diff from a tablet without touching a laptop. Same workload, both products, same coffee-shop Wi-Fi, same Saturday afternoon.

On Ona: opened Safari on the iPad, signed in at app.gitpod.io, picked the repo, and got dropped into a browser VS Code workspace. The Files panel and the editor pane sat at desktop widths that pushed our editing area behind the soft keyboard. We could open a terminal pane, but typing multi-line commands into a tabbed editor surface on a touchscreen is the exact friction iPad request #850 has been asking the team to fix since 2019. The autonomous-agent path (start a background task, walk away, get a PR) actually worked from the iPad because the heavy lifting happens server-side and the dashboard is touch-friendly. That is what Ona is really built for now. The interactive editor-on-iPad path is the unshipped one.

On Cosyra: opened the iOS app on the same iPad, tapped into the existing container, typed git clone, cd, then claude, pasted the prompt, and accepted the diff with one tap. Total wall-clock: about three and a half minutes, most of it the clone over LTE. We then unlocked the Pixel 8, opened the Cosyra Android app, and the same container was waiting at the same prompt because the container is not tied to a device. The session below captures the commands.

The honest flip side: if our job had been "fire off six refactors in parallel, walk the dog, come back to six pull requests waiting for review," Ona would have crushed our experience. We do not have an equivalent. Our agents run when you tell them to and only while you watch them. The two products optimise for different workflows, and the only honest answer is to say which is which.

Where does Gitpod (Ona) beat Cosyra?

Ona beats Cosyra on autonomous background agents, on enterprise governance, on big-CPU compute ceilings, and on prebuilds for team collaboration. We ship a cloud terminal product and we still think Ona is the right tool for several real jobs. If you sit inside any of the four profiles below, Ona is the honest pick, not Cosyra.

• Autonomous background agents. The headline feature: send an agent a task, walk away, come back to a pull request. Run multiple agents in parallel, each in its own ephemeral kernel-isolated environment. We do not have an equivalent. If "I want code being written while I do something else" is what you actually need, Ona is built for that and Cosyra is not. Read the full pitch at ona.com.
• Ona Guardrails for enterprise governance. RBAC, SSO/OIDC, audit trails, command-level controls, kernel-level isolation, and self-hosted VPC deployment on Enterprise. If you work somewhere that needs to point at a soc2-friendly story for cloud dev environments, Ona has the deeper compliance shape. We are a consumer in-app-purchase product without any of that.
• Bigger compute ceilings. Up to 32 cores / 128 GB RAM / GPU on Core. We do not publish specs at that scale because our sessions are sized for interactive coding, not data-science workloads or 30-minute CI on a single box. If your job needs serious horsepower per workspace, Ona has it.
• Prebuilds + team collaboration baked in. Reproducible team environments via devcontainer.json and automations.yml, prebuilds that cache dependencies, team workspaces that everyone joins the same way. The Gitpod team has been refining that workflow for years, and Ona inherits it. We do not ship a team-collaboration story.

Two of these wins come with caveats worth naming. Free environments auto-delete after 3 days idle (Core after 7 days), so the "open a workspace and come back next week" model is not the design intent. Long-lived personal Linux boxes are not what Ona is for. And the OCU credit meter is harder to predict than a flat monthly bill: ~1 OCU for explaining a small codebase, ~8 OCUs for adding a feature to a medium one, so heavy-agent weeks can spike spend in a way flat pricing does not. State the model, not a verdict — both have real users.

Where does Cosyra beat Gitpod (Ona)?

Cosyra beats Ona on native mobile apps, on interactive AI CLIs you drive from the shell, on persistent per-user Ubuntu state, on cross-device continuity, and on flat predictable pricing. The trade-off for those wins is no autonomous-agent orchestration, no enterprise governance plane, and a smaller per-session compute ceiling. If your work lives in any of the five lanes below, we think we are the better pick.

Native iOS and Android apps, not a browser tab

Ona has never shipped a native app on any store, and the iPad feature request gitpod-io/gitpod#850 has been open since October 2019, almost seven years. The only "Gitpod mobile" artifact in existence is an unofficial side project (gitpod-io/gitpod-mobile-ios) whose own README describes it as something a contributor "is hacking on out of hours and on weekends from time to time." It is not on the App Store; it is not a shipped product. We ship a real iOS app and a real Android app, both backed by the same container, both built to be the primary entry point, not a fallback for when the desktop is not around.

Four interactive AI CLIs, not autonomous-only agents

Ona's agents are async by design: hand them a task description, get a pull request later. That is genuinely great for some workflows and useless for others. When we are actually coding on a train, we want the agent typing in front of us, applying diffs we eyeball, switching between Claude Code for a refactor and Codex CLI for tests and Gemini CLI for a quick log summary — by typing a different binary name. Our take on which agent to pick for which job lives in Claude Code vs Gemini CLI and Claude Code vs Codex CLI on phone.

Real persistent Ubuntu 24.04, 30 GB, hibernates and resumes

Ona environments auto-delete after 3 days idle on Free, 7 days on Core. The mental model is "fire up a workspace for a project, finish, move on." Ours is different: a persistent per-user Ubuntu 24.04 x86_64 box with 30 GB of storage that survives device loss, hibernates after idle, and resumes exactly where you left off when you reopen the app. "Your Linux box, reachable from anywhere" — not "a workspace you fire up for a project."

Same container from any device

Sit on the train, edit on your phone. Get home, open the iPad, same shell history. Pull out the laptop, open the web client, same files, same agent session. Ona's browser-only model technically works from any browser, but there is no native app to hand off to and no design intent around picking up the same workspace on a phone five minutes later. Our cross-device continuity is documented in the mobile coding terminal guide, and the cloud IDE on phone pillar lines Ona up against the four other browser-only cloud IDEs on the same cross-device question.

Flat predictable pricing, BYOK on the AI side

$29.99/month or $300/year, with 120 hours of compute included and 30 GB of persistent storage. AI billing is BYOK — you pay Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google directly, no markup. Ona meters compute via OCUs (one-time $10 / 40 OCUs for Free, $20/month entry for Core, OCUs reset monthly), which is fine for predictable usage and rough for spiky weeks. Different shapes for different budgets.

Opinion a competitor would disagree with

We think interactive matters more than autonomous, at least for the keystroke-by-keystroke part of mobile coding. The Ona bet is that the interesting work is async (task in, PR out, walk away), and that is a legitimate bet for a lot of professional codebases. Our counter-bet is that when you are physically on a train or on a couch with a phone in your hand for thirty minutes, you actually want the agent in your face, not in a Slack thread. Plenty of people will disagree. We built Cosyra around the belief that the people disagreeing haven't actually tried handing keystrokes to Claude Code on a phone for a real afternoon.

Who should pick Gitpod (Ona) instead of Cosyra?

Pick Ona instead of Cosyra if your job is autonomous background agents, if you need enterprise governance, if you need big per-workspace compute, or if your team already runs reproducible devcontainer-based prebuilds. Ona is the right answer for those four profiles, full stop.

Pick Ona if you are one of these profiles

• Async agent operator. Your week is full of "I want this done by tomorrow morning" tasks you'd rather hand to an agent than do yourself. You want parallel agents on parallel branches, then a queue of pull requests to review with coffee. That is Ona's whole pitch and we don't replicate it.
• Enterprise engineering org. You need SSO/OIDC, RBAC, audit trails, command-level controls, self-hosted VPC deployment, and a vendor who answers procurement questionnaires. Ona Guardrails is the right shape for that buyer. Cosyra is a consumer in-app-purchase product and we won't pretend otherwise.
• Heavy per-workspace compute. You need 32 cores or 128 GB RAM or a GPU inside the workspace, and you need it within a few minutes of starting. Ona Core scales there; our sessions are sized for interactive coding.
• Team running on devcontainer prebuilds. Your repo already has a working devcontainer.json, your CI burns minutes on dependency installs you'd rather cache, and you want every PR to spin up a reproducible environment in seconds. Ona's prebuild pipeline is built for that and we don't ship one.

We run Ona environments on one of our test laptops specifically because we wanted to write this comparison from first-hand experience. The product is polished, the agent dashboard is genuinely thoughtful, and the enterprise-governance story is a real differentiator. Where it does not fit is our exact use case (interactive coding from a phone or tablet), and that gap is what Cosyra exists to fill. They are not mutually exclusive tools.

How do you try Cosyra if you're coming from Gitpod (Ona)?

You try Cosyra from a Gitpod or Ona background in about two minutes: install the iOS or Android app, sign in, and land in a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 x86_64 container with four AI CLIs already on PATH. The conceptual jump is "browser tab full of IDE panels" to "full-screen terminal with an agent you talk to." Muscle memory for gp or devcontainer.json doesn't carry over — there is no equivalent prebuild concept — but if your day was mostly git, npm, and a single agent, you will feel at home immediately. The session below captures a first-time install coming from Ona.

The big unlock for most people coming from Gitpod or Ona is the persistence model and the agent-count axis. You stop watching the OCU meter because there isn't one. You stop losing context when a workspace times out because the container hibernates and resumes. You stop reaching for the laptop because the phone app is the primary entry point, not a fallback. And if you sometimes want async background agents on top of all that, you keep your Ona account too — they live in different lanes.

Frequently asked questions