Developer Tools · head to head
Ona (formerly Gitpod) vs Height

Ona (formerly Gitpod)
Developer Tools
Cloud development environments repositioned as a control plane for software engineering agents
- From
- Free
- Free plan
- Yes
Height
Technology
A project management tool from a small independent vendor that uses AI agents to handle routine ticket maintenance.
- From
- Free
- Free plan
- Yes
The short version
- Each has a real cost: Ona (formerly Gitpod) acquisition risk has already materialised: the company closed a sale to OpenAI on 10 August 2026 and now sits inside the Codex team, so nothing public guarantees pricing, continuity or neutrality between model vendors beyond honouring existing commitments.; Height it is one product from one small venture-funded company with no second line of business underwriting it, so adopting it as your system of record is a bet on that company's funding, and the tool holds work history you would have to reconstruct elsewhere if the bet fails.
- They diverge on capability: Ona (formerly Gitpod) covers Ephemeral environments, Height covers Autonomous triage.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Ona (formerly Gitpod) and Height actually diverge.
| Attribute | Ona (formerly Gitpod) | Height |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per month by compute unit | Unknown |
| Platforms | Web, Linux, macOS, Windows, AWS, Google Cloud Platform | Web |
| Category | Developer Tools | Technology |
| Founded | Unknown | 2018 |
Identical on both: starting price (Free), free tier (Yes), user rating (Not yet rated).
What each one covers
Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.
Only in Ona (formerly Gitpod)
- Ephemeral environments
- Agent sessions
- Bring your own cloud
- Devcontainer standard
- Compute unit budgeting
- Enterprise identity
Only in Height
- Autonomous triage
- Duplicate detection
- Attribute maintenance
- Per-task chat
- Multiple views
- Developer integrations
- Custom fields and filters
- Public API
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
Ona (formerly Gitpod)
- Giving a large engineering team identical, disposable environments so onboarding is a link rather than a two day setupnot Height
- Running several coding agents in parallel against real databases and services instead of on a laptopnot Height
- Keeping source code off contractor and offshore laptops by moving the whole environment into a controlled accountnot Height
- Reproducing a hard-to-configure toolchain for a short-lived project without polluting anyone machinenot Height
Height
- A product or engineering team with no dedicated project manager, where backlog upkeep currently falls on whoever has timenot Ona (formerly Gitpod)
- Teams leaving Jira because its configuration and administration cost more attention than the tracking is worthnot Ona (formerly Gitpod)
- A support or intake queue where incoming requests need categorising and deduplicating before anyone can plan themnot Ona (formerly Gitpod)
- Startups that want tasks, chat and progress tracking in one tool rather than stitching a tracker to a chat appnot Ona (formerly Gitpod)
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
Ona (formerly Gitpod)
- Acquisition risk has already materialised: the company closed a sale to OpenAI on 10 August 2026 and now sits inside the Codex team, so nothing public guarantees pricing, continuity or neutrality between model vendors beyond honouring existing commitments.
- Two disruptive changes of direction inside a year, from development environments to agent orchestration and then from independence to acquisition, mean the product a browser IDE buyer originally chose no longer exists in that form.
- The Gitpod Classic sunset on 15 October 2025 required manual conversion of configuration, hand-moved secrets, self-rescued workspace data and a brand new account, which is the clearest available precedent for how the vendor handles deprecation.
- Community self-hosting is finished: the AGPL-3.0 repository is deprecated by its own README, and self-hosted now means a vendor-operated install in your AWS or GCP account, with no Azure, no on-premises and no air-gapped path.
- Pricing is difficult to model because it runs on a compute unit currency where subscription credits expire at the end of the month, the mapping from units to actual compute is not published on the pricing page, and Enterprise is quotation only.
Height
- It is one product from one small venture-funded company with no second line of business underwriting it, so adopting it as your system of record is a bet on that company's funding, and the tool holds work history you would have to reconstruct elsewhere if the bet fails.
- The 2024 relaunch as Height 2.0 reoriented the product around AI agents and changed workflows customers had already built on, which is the clearest available evidence of how much the product may be re-shaped again under you.
- The ecosystem is small next to Jira, Linear and Asana: fewer third-party integrations, no consultancy market, and far less written material to search when something behaves unexpectedly, so support questions go to the vendor and wait.
- The automation only pays off if tasks contain enough substance for a model to work with; on a team whose tickets are two-word titles, the agents have nothing to triage or deduplicate and the product reduces to an ordinary tracker at a premium.
- Task content is processed by hosted large language models, so a security review becomes a question about subprocessors and data handling, and there is no self-hosted or on-premises deployment to fall back on if the answer is unacceptable.
- There is no widely used two-way synchronisation with Jira, so an organisation where one team adopts Height and the rest stay on Jira ends up with two systems of record and manual reconciliation between them.
Pricing, plan by plan
Ona (formerly Gitpod)
Free- FreeFree
- Up to 3 parallel environments
- Machines up to 4 vCPU, 16 GB memory and 80 GB disk
- Ona Cloud multi-tenant only
- Core$20/month
- From 20 US dollars a month, up to 100 team members
- Includes 80 to 2,200 recurring compute units a month depending on tier
- Additional units from 10 US dollars per 40 units
- Enterprise$undefined/year
- Single-tenant deployment in your own AWS or GCP account
- SAML and OIDC single sign-on
- Dedicated account management and forward deployed engineers
Height
FreeNo published plan breakdown. See the Height review.
Which should you pick?
Choose Ona (formerly Gitpod) if
- You need ephemeral environments.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows, AWS, Google Cloud Platform.
- You also want agent sessions.
Choose Height if
- You need autonomous triage.
- You want to start without paying.
- You also want duplicate detection.
Questions people ask
- Is Ona (formerly Gitpod) or Height better?
- Neither clearly leads. Ona (formerly Gitpod) starts at Free and Height at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Ona (formerly Gitpod) or Height?
- Ona (formerly Gitpod) starts at Free and Height at Free.
- Does Ona (formerly Gitpod) or Height run on more platforms?
- Ona (formerly Gitpod) runs on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows, AWS, Google Cloud Platform. Height runs on Web.
- Can I use Ona (formerly Gitpod) for free?
- Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
- What is Ona (formerly Gitpod) best used for?
- Ona (formerly Gitpod) is most often used for giving a large engineering team identical, disposable environments so onboarding is a link rather than a two day setup, running several coding agents in parallel against real databases and services instead of on a laptop, keeping source code off contractor and offshore laptops by moving the whole environment into a controlled account, reproducing a hard-to-configure toolchain for a short-lived project without polluting anyone machine. Of those, giving a large engineering team identical, disposable environments so onboarding is a link rather than a two day setup and running several coding agents in parallel against real databases and services instead of on a laptop are not what Height is typically brought in for.
- What can Ona (formerly Gitpod) do that Height cannot?
- Ona (formerly Gitpod) covers Ephemeral environments, Agent sessions, Bring your own cloud, Devcontainer standard. Height covers Autonomous triage, Duplicate detection, Attribute maintenance, Per-task chat.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
Ona (formerly Gitpod): Is Gitpod still called Gitpod?
No. It rebranded to Ona in September 2025, and gitpod.io now redirects to ona.com. The company was acquired by OpenAI in a deal that closed on 10 August 2026.
Height: How is this different from Jira automation?
Jira automation is rule-based: you define a trigger and an action. Height's agents read the content of tasks and act on judgement, such as recognising that two tickets describe the same bug, which no rule can express.
Ona (formerly Gitpod): Can I still self-host it for free?
No. The AGPL-3.0 self-hosted project is deprecated by its own README. What is offered now is a vendor-operated single-tenant install in your AWS or GCP account on the Enterprise plan.
Height: Can we self-host it?
No. It is software as a service only, with no on-premises or private-cloud deployment. If your requirements rule out a hosted tracker, this is not a candidate.
Ona (formerly Gitpod): What happened to Gitpod Classic?
Pay-as-you-go Classic was switched off on 15 October 2025. Migration required converting gitpod.yml to devcontainer.json, moving secrets by hand, downloading workspace data before the cutoff and creating a new account.
Height: What happens to our data if the company fails?
You would need an export and a migration to another tool. This is the standard risk with a single-product startup, and it is worth confirming the export path covers task history, comments and custom fields before committing to it.
Ona (formerly Gitpod): What does it cost?
Core starts at 20 US dollars a month and includes a monthly allowance of Ona Compute Units, with more from 10 dollars per 40 units. Subscription credits expire monthly. Enterprise is quoted.
Height: Does it work for non-engineering teams?
Yes, the views and custom fields are generic enough for marketing, operations or support queues. Its integrations, though, are aimed at software teams, so a non-engineering team gets less of the surrounding value.
Height: Do the AI features need our tickets to be well written?
In practice, yes. Triage, deduplication and attribute maintenance work from what is written in the task, so the return is much higher on a team that already writes descriptive tickets than on one that does not.
Related pages
More on Ona (formerly Gitpod)
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- Ona (formerly Gitpod) vs Zabbix Cloud
- Height vs Coder
- Height vs CodeSandbox
- Height vs StackBlitz
- Height vs Namespace
- Height vs Daytona
- Height vs Earthly
- Height vs Nixpacks
- Height vs Spacelift
- Height vs Atlantis
- Height vs Backstage
- Height vs Cloud Native Buildpacks
- Height vs ConfigCat
- Height vs Xlinesoft
- Height vs GNU Emacs
- Height vs Keil MDK
- Height vs Vite
- Height vs Bazel
- Height vs Asana
- Height vs ClickUp
- Height vs Linear
- Height vs Monday.com
- Height vs Shortcut
- Height vs Coda
- Height vs Intercom
- Height vs Attio
- Height vs Jenkins
- Height vs Kubernetes
- Height vs Notion
- Height vs Figma
- Height vs Site24x7
- Height vs StatusCake
- Height vs Storybook
- Height vs WebStorm
- Height vs Zabbix Cloud
