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Ona (formerly Gitpod)

Cloud development environments repositioned as a control plane for software engineering agents

As of 31 August 2026, Ona (formerly Gitpod) has a free plan and paid plans start at $20/month. Gitpod renamed itself Ona in September 2025, pivoted from browser development environments to running autonomous coding agents, and was acquired by OpenAI in a deal that closed on 10 August 2026. Softwr lists it under Developer Tools. Ona (formerly Gitpod) is made by Ona (part of OpenAI), available on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows.

Overview

What Ona (formerly Gitpod) does

Ona provisions ephemeral, production-like development environments from a devcontainer definition, and now positions them as the place autonomous software engineering agents do their work, with humans reviewing rather than typing. Environments run in Ona Cloud or inside your own AWS or GCP account as a vendor-operated single-tenant install. It is closed source commercial software; the older AGPL-3.0 gitpod-io/gitpod repository still exists with roughly 13,700 stars but its own README says the version is no longer recommended. Three things happened in twelve months and each of them changes a buying decision. In September 2025 the company rebranded from Gitpod to Ona and described it as a re-founding rather than a rename, shifting the category from cloud development environments to agent orchestration. On 15 October 2025 pay-as-you-go Gitpod Classic was switched off, and migration was manual: gitpod.yml had to be converted to devcontainer.json, secrets and environment variables moved by hand, workspace contents downloaded before the cutoff, and a new account created because credentials did not transfer. Then on 11 June 2026 the company announced it was joining OpenAI, and the transaction closed on 10 August 2026, with Ona now operating inside the Codex team. Buyers are engineering organisations standardising development environments and, increasingly, teams running fleets of coding agents against real services. Published pricing starts at 20 US dollars a month for Core, which includes a monthly allowance of Ona Compute Units, with additional credits from 10 dollars per 40 units; subscription credits expire at the end of the month while purchased add-on credits last a year. The trade-offs are ownership and continuity. True community self-hosting is gone, deployment is limited to AWS and GCP with no Azure or air-gapped option found, the roadmap now serves OpenAI Codex, and the only public commitment to existing customers is support under existing commitments.

What people use it 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

The honest half

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about 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.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Ona (formerly Gitpod)

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Pricing

What Ona (formerly Gitpod) costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Free

Free

  • Up to 3 parallel environments
  • Machines up to 4 vCPU, 16 GB memory and 80 GB disk
  • Ona Cloud multi-tenant only

Core

$20 /mo

  • 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
  • Subscription credits expire at the end of each month
  • Unlimited parallel environments and GPU access

Enterprise

On request

  • Single-tenant deployment in your own AWS or GCP account
  • SAML and OIDC single sign-on
  • Dedicated account management and forward deployed engineers
  • Priced by quotation

Capabilities

Features

  • Ephemeral environments

    Provisions a clean environment per branch or task from a devcontainer definition

  • Agent sessions

    Runs coding agents in isolated environments with access to real services and dependencies

  • Bring your own cloud

    Vendor-operated single-tenant deployment inside your AWS or GCP account

  • Devcontainer standard

    Uses devcontainer.json rather than a proprietary manifest

  • Compute unit budgeting

    Meters environment and agent time against a monthly credit allowance

  • Enterprise identity

    Single sign-on through SAML and OIDC on the Enterprise plan

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Ona (formerly Gitpod), because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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