These two look superficially similar. Both run AI coding agents with a planner/reviewer split, both are model-agnostic, both reach Slack. That makes this the comparison worth doing carefully. The real difference is commercial platform vs. self-hosted software factory.
Factory is the more complete product, and it isn't close. It reaches more surfaces, ships managed sandboxes, integrates with the ticketing systems enterprises actually use, publishes benchmark results, and comes with SOC 2, support and an SLA.
Last Light is the more ownable system. It is self-hosted at every tier rather than only at Enterprise, every behaviour is YAML you can read and fork, and the security boundary (egress firewall, per-run token scopes) is yours to set rather than the vendor's to assert.
If you're evaluating both, the question that decides it is rarely a feature: it's whether "on-prem" is a line item you're willing to buy an Enterprise contract for, or a property you need from day one.
| Last Light | Factory droid | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Self-hosted at every tier | SaaS; on-prem only on Enterprise |
| Surfaces | GitHub, Slack, dashboard, CLI | Terminal, VS Code, JetBrains, Vim, browser, Slack |
| Model choice | BYO: Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter and others | Claude, GPT-5.x, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen |
| Ticketing | GitHub-issue-centric | Jira and Linear first-class |
| Isolation | Docker / micro-VM sandbox + default-deny egress firewall | Managed cloud sandboxes (“Droid Computers”) |
| Customisation | Fork any workflow, prompt or persona via the overlay | Configurable within the product |
| Benchmarks | None published; ships an eval harness you point at your own repos | Published Terminal-Bench leadership |
| Compliance | Whatever you build. You own the boundary | SOC 2 Type II, support, SLA |
| Cost | Free / MIT + your model spend + your infra | $20 / $100 / $200 per mo + Team/Enterprise |
instance/ overlay..lastlight/ layer of its own, so teams tune the agent for their code without going through you.you want a polished, supported, multi-surface platform your whole team can adopt today, you're fine with a SaaS vendor (or buying Enterprise for on-prem), and you value benchmark-leading models and zero-ops sandboxes over owning the stack.
you need the agent on your own infrastructure with your own keys and a network boundary you control, you want repo-maintenance behaviours as forkable YAML, and you'd rather operate an OSS harness than pay and trust a SaaS, accepting that you own the ops.
Point-in-time as of June 2026. Factory's pricing, model menu and benchmark scores move quickly, so check their pricing page before relying on a figure here.