EasySpawn vs Ona (formerly Gitpod)
If you are reading this, there is a decent chance you did not choose to be in the market. Gitpod Classic shut down in October 2025, Gitpod became Ona, and the platform was rebuilt on a proprietary, non-Kubernetes runtime centred on AI agents rather than human-driven workspaces.
That is a legitimate strategic move and Ona is a serious product with a serious team behind it. But "the product I bought became a different product" is a migration event whether or not you wanted one, and it is worth being deliberate about where you go next.
Side by side
| EasySpawn | Ona (formerly Gitpod) | |
|---|---|---|
| Company maturity | Pre-launch | Years of production history as Gitpod, now Ona |
| Primary model | Persistent workspace that also hosts the app | Agent-centric environments on a proprietary runtime |
| AI billing | Bring your own Claude subscription; Anthropic bills you directly | Bundled into the platform's own agent product |
| Managed database | Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, or Redis, provisioned automatically | Not the focus of the product |
| Custom domains and SSL | Connect a domain you own; SSL automatic | Not part of the product |
| Self-hosting | Not available | Available for enterprise |
| Best suited to | Solo developers, freelancers, small teams | Engineering organisations adopting agents at scale |
Choose Ona (formerly Gitpod) if
- You need an agent platform for a whole engineering organisation, with the governance that implies.
- You want a vendor with years of operating history and enterprise support.
- Self-hosting matters to you.
- You were happy with the direction Gitpod took and Ona fits how your team already works.
Choose EasySpawn if
- You want your Claude subscription to stay yours, billed by Anthropic, with no markup in between.
- You want the database, domain, and SSL handled as part of the same product.
- You are one person or a small team, and enterprise platform features are cost without benefit.
- You want a live URL for the thing you are building, not just an environment to build it in.
Where EasySpawn loses
Every product has a shape, and ours excludes things. These are the cases where we would tell you to pick something else.
- Ona is a real company with real scale and years of operating history. We are pre-launch, and if vendor stability is your main concern after the Gitpod shutdown, that concern points away from us.
- Ona can be self-hosted for enterprise. We cannot.
- Ona's runtime is engineered for scale we have not had to handle yet.
- If you need to support a large engineering organisation, we are not currently the right answer.
- EasySpawn is pre-launch. There is no public track record, no uptime history to point at, and no third-party reviews. Every competitor on this page has shipped to real users for years.
- You do not get root. No sudo, no apt install, no Docker socket. Package managers (npm, pnpm, pip, cargo, bun) and git work normally, but host-level operations are restricted so the platform stays managed. If you need to install system packages, this is a hard blocker.
- EasySpawn is built around Claude Code specifically. If you work primarily in Cursor, Copilot, Codex, or Gemini CLI, most of the value here does not apply to you.
Other comparisons
EasySpawn vs GitHub Codespaces
Codespaces is the better pure development environment and scales far higher. EasySpawn is the better fit when you want the environment and the running application to be the same thing.
EasySpawn vs Coder
Coder wins if you need self-hosting, governance, or scale, and have the ops capacity to run it. EasySpawn wins if you want none of that responsibility.