Farna Control vs Factory.ai
Farna Control and Factory sit at different points in the delivery system. Factory provides an agentic software factory; Farna Control is a Delivery Governance Platform that governs the lifecycle around whichever runtimes, forges and automation tools you use, including a factory you did not buy from us.
Comparison table
| Dimension | Farna Control | Factory.ai |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An Agentic Delivery Governance platform for the software lifecycle. It dispatches work to the agent runtimes you already use and governs the delivery around each call: scoped credentials, gates, human review, spend control and an evidence record you can verify offline. It can sit across multiple factories and tools; it does not write your code or supply your agents. | An agentic software factory. Since Factory 2.0 (June 2026) it sells the production system from signal intake through planned change, agent execution, review, release and monitoring as a managed platform, with model choice, sovereignty options and continual learning across the loop. |
| Hosting and data residency | Self-hosted at every tier, including the free Community edition. Runs on your infrastructure, in your cloud or behind a VPN, and it is air-gap capable. No telemetry by default, opt-in only, and you can read the source before you run it. | SaaS with sovereignty options. Factory 2.0 offers model independence, bring-your-own-key, a self-hosted data plane, EU-specific hosting, or a fully air-gapped deployment. On-premise deployment and data residency are listed on the Enterprise tier, which is custom-quoted. |
| Licensing model | Source-available under BUSL. The farnalabs/farna-control repository is public and inspectable. The license restricts the field of use but does not restrict internal use. Not OSI-approved open-source. | Proprietary platform. Some components are published openly - an ESLint plugin, a plugin marketplace, TypeScript and Python SDKs, a code-review action - but the platform itself is closed-source, so neither the pipeline that runs your work nor the governance logic that checks it can be inspected. |
| Governance features | Governance ships in the product, not in a sales tier. HITL gates with human-only decisions, hash-chained audit, bounded autonomy with per-pipeline levels, capability scopes and spend controls across every tier. SSO/SAML, SCIM, team RBAC and organization-level spend limits are in the single Team tier. | Factory 2.0 puts autonomy controls, model selection, org-level deny lists and network policy on the Business tier, with audit logging, ZDR and SSO/SCIM also from Business upward. Those are real governance features. The distinction is scope: they govern the factory Factory runs for you, configured in Factory, recorded by Factory. |
| Evidence for what shipped | Offline-verifiable evidence: one hash-chained record spanning every tool a change touches, graded observed, derived, reported, or attested, and checkable by a party holding only the export and a pre-published verification key - no vendor service involved. | OTEL-native audit and telemetry for Factory's own agents, generated by Factory and read in Factory's console. That is genuine operational telemetry. Independent re-verification of the record by a third party is not a documented capability. |
| Pricing model | One annual license per organization, per deployment. No per-seat, no per-run, no usage metering. The cost does not grow when you add engineers, reviewers, security stakeholders, or QA. Current price on /control/pricing. | Per-user monthly. Pro $20/user/mo, Plus $100/user/mo, Max $200/user/mo. Teams tier $60/mo/team + $40/mo/seat, hard-capped at 10 seats. Business and Enterprise tiers are custom-quoted with no published price. As published at factory.ai/pricing, 3 November 2026. |
| Pricing predictability | One number. No usage variable. No seat count to track. No surprise invoices when adoption grows. | Usage scales with headcount and agent consumption. The Teams tier costs $5,520/year at its 10-seat ceiling (our calculation from the published Teams price: $60 plus 10 x $40, x 12). Getting governance requires moving to Business or Enterprise - at a price published only to sales conversations. |
| Support model | Direct, asynchronous support from the team on the Team tier: response within 24 hours, seven days a week. No sales calls, no account managers. No uptime SLA and no contractual SLA - Farna Control is self-hosted and you operate the infrastructure. Self-service purchase with an offline signed license key. | Enterprise tier includes a dedicated account manager and SLA'd priority support. Lower tiers are self-serve. |
| Target buyer | DevX and Platform Engineering teams in organizations of 50-1,000 engineers who already use coding agents and need governance before they expand that usage - whether or not they also run a factory. | Engineering leadership at large enterprises, including regulated ones, buying a managed factory end to end. Factory names NVIDIA, EY, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, Adyen, Blackstone, Wipro and Comarch in its own Factory 2.0 announcement. |
| Published reliability data | We do not publish a first-attempt merge rate, and neither does Factory. We publish delivery numbers from our own pipeline, which is a smaller thing than a benchmark and is described as such wherever we use it. | Factory does not publish a first-attempt merge rate, a cross-vendor benchmark, or a comparable reliability figure. No vendor in this category does; the category's own commentary has said so since July 2026. |
| Controls outside the model | Credentials, schemas, budgets, gates and pauses are enforced by the runtime and connectors, not by an agent prompt. Human-only gates separate an agent's report from an authorized decision. | Factory documents controls around its managed factory. We found no public documentation for an equivalent cross-tool control plane outside Factory's own runtime. |
| How products compose | Farna Control can govern a Factory deployment as one agent runtime among many, while Factory continues to provide its own factory experience. | Factory is the primary delivery system in this comparison; a separate governance layer can sit around it when the buyer needs cross-system evidence or controls. |
Farna Control's current Team price is on /control/pricing.
Matching tiers like for like
Factory's visible tiers start at $20/user/mo, which is a different product from a governed deployment. The like-for-like comparison is the governance tier. The visible tiers are Pro at $20/user/mo, Plus at $100/user/mo and Max at $200/user/mo, as published on Factory's pricing page.
None of Factory's self-serve tiers - Pro, Plus, Max, or Teams - include SSO, audit logging, or admin controls. At any seat count, at any usage level, those tiers include no governance features. The Teams tier, which is the first tier that bundles anything beyond individual agent usage, costs $60/mo per team plus $40/mo per seat, hard-capped at 10 seats. At its ceiling that is $5,520/year (our calculation from the published Teams price: $60 plus 10 x $40, x 12), and the Teams tier does not list SSO, audit logging or admin controls.
To match what Farna Control's Team plan unlocks - SSO, SCIM, audit logging, role-based access, HITL gates - a Factory buyer must move to Business or Enterprise. Both are custom-quoted. Neither publishes a price. Business and Enterprise pricing is available through Factory's sales team.
The structural difference matters more than the number. Factory's pricing is usage-metered even before governance is added - the Plus and Max tiers are literally usage multipliers. The more your engineers rely on Factory's agents, the more it costs. Farna Control's flat annual fee has the opposite shape: heavier usage adds no cost.
When Farna Control is the better fit
- Governance at a predictable cost - SSO, SCIM, RBAC, audit logging, HITL gates, bounded autonomy, and cost controls under one flat annual license.
- Self-hosted at every tier, including the free Community edition.
- Source-available code you can inspect - BUSL-licensed with a public repository.
- Cost that does not grow with headcount - adding reviewers, security stakeholders, legal, and QA costs nothing extra.
- Governance features without an enterprise sales process - self-service, no sales call required.
- You already run a factory, or several, and need one control function over all of it, owned by you rather than by the vendor that sold you the factory.
When Factory is the better fit
- You want one vendor to own the whole factory - agents, harness, infrastructure and model access - rather than assembling those pieces and governing them yourself.
- A fully managed experience - Factory handles infrastructure, model access, and runtime orchestration.
- Dedicated support and an SLA at the Enterprise tier.
- Named enterprise customers, including NVIDIA, EY and Adobe, in its own announcements.
- Closed-source with a vendor SLA for compliance regimes that require it.
Factory's funding and market position
Factory is well capitalized and growing quickly. It has not published revenue or ARR, and we make no claim about profitability.
Factory does offer on-premise deployment. It exists only behind a custom-quoted Enterprise sales conversation, with no self-serve option and no published price, and even then it ships a closed-source binary.
Try Farna Control
Farna Control is self-hosted. You can evaluate it without talking to anyone.
Questions? Open a discussion on GitHub.
See also: Audit trail for AI-generated code, AI agent cost visibility, and governing coding agents across teams.