Both call themselves a software factory. 8090 means an enterprise delivery platform that takes business intent all the way to a production application; Last Light means a self-hosted service that maintains repositories you already own. Knowing which problem you have decides this one quickly.
These are not competitors, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. 8090 sells a way for regulated enterprises to get applications built, connecting business intent, requirements, architecture, work orders, code, testing and production maintenance into one governed pipeline that people and agents share. It raised a $135M Series A led by Salesforce in June 2026 and works with healthcare, insurance, life sciences, aerospace, energy, manufacturing, financial services and US government customers.
Last Light does something much narrower: it sits on repositories you already have and keeps them healthy. Issues get triaged, pull requests get reviewed, security sweeps run weekly, fixes get proposed. It does not take requirements, it does not produce an application, and it does not come with a delivery team.
The term "software factory" covers both because both describe software work as a production line. But one is a line for building new systems under enterprise governance, and the other is a line for maintaining existing repositories.
| Last Light | 8090 | |
|---|---|---|
| What it produces | Maintenance of existing repos: triage, review, fixes, reports | New or modernised enterprise applications |
| Starting point | A GitHub repository and a webhook | Business intent, requirements, architecture |
| Buyer | A platform or engineering team | An enterprise programme, often with a systems integrator |
| Delivery | Software you install and run | A platform, or a full build-host-manage engagement |
| Hosting | Self-hosted only, by you | Vendor-hosted or vendor-managed |
| Governance | Approval gates, scoped tokens, and a full transcript of every run, all on your infra | Governance and audit of every decision, by design |
| Industries | Any team on GitHub | Regulated: healthcare, finance, aerospace, government |
| Licence | MIT, free, source on GitHub | Commercial, enterprise contract |
| Time to value | An afternoon, if you can run Docker | A procurement cycle and a delivery programme |
you need applications built or modernised in a regulated environment, the audit trail from business intent to production is a compliance requirement, and you're buying a platform and a delivery capability rather than installing a tool.
the code already exists and the problem is keeping up with it (triage, review, security sweeps and small fixes) and you want that running on your own infrastructure, for free, with every behaviour open to inspection.
These can also coexist: nothing about an enterprise build programme prevents a self-hosted maintenance agent running on the repositories it produces. Details about 8090 are point-in-time (June 2026) and drawn from public sources. See the sources on the comparisons hub.