Augment ships and runs its own agents across the SDLC on paid cloud compute. Pulse is the free, local gate that blocks work from shipping without evidence.
Both put structure in front of an agent before it starts writing code. They diverge on who runs the agent, and what “cleared” means.
Each stage is a gate, not a suggestion. The next one doesn’t open until the one before it clears, checked against evidence, not a single approval click. Runs as one local service you install and own.
Augment orchestrates who does each step and hands the result to a human at one checkpoint. Pulse enforces what “cleared” means at every step with a scored, evidence-backed gate.
The same four numbers gate every task on a Pulse board, configured once and enforced every time.
Augment does not expose a per-task numeric gate a customer configures. Its closest equivalents are structural:
Augment’s review model is real, and it is optimized deliberately for recall (catch everything) rather than precision, by Augment’s own description. What it doesn’t do is give a customer a configurable, per-task threshold that blocks a status change until a number clears. That’s a structural difference in how “good enough” gets decided, not a missing feature.
How each capability actually behaves, not just whether it exists.
| Capability | Okto Pulse | Augment Code (Cosmos) |
|---|---|---|
| COVERAGE & TRACEABILITY | ||
| SDLC breadth | Partial Ideation through Tasks, the pre-code and build phases. No deploy, monitor, or incident-response coverage. |
Native Ticket to PR to review to deploy to monitor, plus dedicated solutions for coverage, incidents, security, and migrations. |
| Formal spec artifact and state machine | Native A named Spec stage with locked and validated states, distinct from Ideation and Refinement. |
Partial Design docs and plans exist per solution, but no single spec state machine shared across the product. |
| Traceability | Native Requirement to task to test to evidence, as queryable Knowledge Graph edges. |
Partial The Context Engine reconciles claims against the live repo, and each loop keeps shared memory, but none of it is exposed as a queryable graph. |
| Brownfield grounding | Native A dedicated Refinement stage investigates existing code and constraints before a spec is written. |
Native The Context Engine explicitly reconciles every claim against the actual repository before a design or plan is written. |
| GOVERNANCE & VALIDATION | ||
| Configurable per-task quality gate | Native Four scored thresholds block a status change automatically. |
Not supported The Review Fleet triages by risk; there’s no customer-configurable numeric gate on an individual task. |
| Human approval checkpoints | Native Role-aware permissions and locked spec states. |
Native An explicit human approval step is built into every solution. |
| Compliance and audit tooling | Partial No formal compliance certifications yet, a young 0.3.x product. |
Native SOC 2 Type II on all paid plans; CMEK, ISO 42001, SIEM integration, and audit trails on Enterprise. |
| Enterprise readiness | Partial Governance gates and an audit trail exist today, in an early-stage product with no formal compliance program yet. |
Native $252M raised, SOC 2 Type II standard, named enterprise customers, dedicated support and SLA on Enterprise. |
| OPERATIONS & EXTENSIBILITY | ||
| Deployment | Local-first: SQLite plus an embedded graph database, source available under Elastic License 2.0. | Cloud-first SaaS: managed sandboxes by default, with the option to bring your own machines. Closed source. |
| Pricing | Free to run, no published paid tier. | $20/mo Standard or $100/mo Business (up to 50 seats, usage included), overages billed at provider price plus a 40% service fee, plus compute. Enterprise is custom. |
| Native automation triggers | Not supported Pulse has no ticketing or scheduling triggers of its own. |
Native GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Linear, Jira, cron schedules, and typed webhooks trigger workflows directly. |
| Extensibility surface | Native 200+ MCP tools, plus Okto Nexus for multi-agent coordination. |
Native An Expert Registry to fork, build, and share reusable agents, plus an MCP Registry for external tools. |
| Who runs the agent | Not applicable Pulse doesn’t ship or run an agent; it governs whatever agent connects to it. |
Native Cosmos ships and runs its own Experts, with model routing across providers. |
Augment’s pricing and plan inclusions move with their own release cycle; reconfirm against augmentcode.com/pricing before relying on this table. Pulse’s MCP tool count varies by release, pinned here to its current version. Rows reflect each project’s public docs, pricing page, and website as of August 2026.
…the goal is a fully managed, paid platform that runs the whole software lifecycle for you, tickets in, reviewed PRs out, with enterprise compliance certifications and a team behind it you can call. Its own published numbers (2 to 3x throughput, 66% faster time to merge on code review) reflect real investment, even though they’re Augment’s own reported figures rather than independently audited.
…you want to keep the agent stack you already run and pay for, and specifically need the spec-to-evidence discipline underneath it: a real gate that blocks “done” until a number clears, a Knowledge Graph that remembers why a decision was made, and zero recurring cost to get it. Pulse doesn’t try to replace your coding agent, your CI, or your incident response.
These aren’t really competing for the same budget line. Augment is a platform purchase. Pulse is free infrastructure. A team already running Augment’s Experts could still install Pulse underneath them for the gate discipline, since Pulse speaks MCP like anything else. No such integration exists today, so that’s a workflow idea, not a promise.
An agent finishes a task. Neither tool takes that claim the same way.
The Review Fleet’s risk scoring decides whether a human sees the diff at all. A well-scoped, low-risk change can go from ticket to merged PR without a person reading the code, by design.
The task can’t reach done until all four thresholds clear, every time, regardless of how the Builder or a risk model scored its own confidence.
Both systems reduce how often a human has to look at every PR. Augment does it by scoring risk and routing on that score. Pulse does it by requiring a scored, evidence-backed pass before the status can change at all. Neither is wrong, they’re different bets on where the discipline should live: in a risk model deciding what a human sees, or in a threshold nothing can bypass.
Both products have real, working memory. The difference is whether you can query it.
Every one of these is a real relationship in the graph, not a comment or a filename convention. Queryable months after the session that created it.
Described as shared memory across runs, agents, and teams, distilled per repo and per loop type: Delegation Memory, Automation Memory, Code Review Memory. It’s real, and it’s shared across Experts. It isn’t exposed to a customer as a queryable graph with typed relationships, it functions more like an internal system that makes future runs sharper, not a data structure you can query yourself.
The difference isn’t whether memory exists. It’s whether it’s a black box that makes the next run better, or a graph you can open and read.
Augment has no slash commands to translate. One install boots Pulse's whole runtime instead.
# installs the CLI, boots the board + MCP server
pip install okto-pulse
okto-pulse init
okto-pulse serve
→ Web UI on port :8100, MCP server on port :8101/mcp. Connect two separate agent identities, Executor and Validator, each with its own credentials.
| Augment concept | Closest Pulse equivalent |
|---|---|
| Task Intake | Ideation |
| Planner / design doc approval | Spec, gated on approval |
| PR Author | Not supported · Pulse doesn’t write code |
| Review Fleet | Validator gate, mechanically different: risk-scored triage vs. a required threshold pass |
| Context Engine | Partial equivalent: Refinement stage plus Knowledge Graph, narrower in scope than a full codebase index |
| Organization Knowledge | Knowledge Graph, but queryable rather than an internal memory signal |
| Native GitHub / Jira / Linear / Slack triggers | Not supported · Pulse has no triggers of its own |
| Deploy and monitor loops | Not supported · outside Pulse’s scope entirely |
This mapping is intentionally incomplete. Augment covers ground, deploy, monitor, incident response, native triggers, that Pulse was never built to cover. A false 1:1 here would be more misleading than useful.
This is the clearest structural difference on the page.
Cosmos’s Experts are Augment’s, running on Augment’s compute, with model routing Augment controls. Augment also ships a CLI and supports MCP and native tool connections to pull in outside context, but the coding agent itself is Augment’s, not something you bring.
Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, and any other MCP-compatible agent, present or future, query the same board with zero extra setup on Pulse’s side, because Pulse isn’t an agent. It’s the thing agents talk to.
Choosing Augment means adopting Augment’s agents. Choosing Pulse means keeping whatever agents you already use and adding a governance layer underneath them.
Different kind of product, mostly. Augment is a paid platform that runs its own agents across the whole SDLC. Pulse is free infrastructure that governs whatever agent you already use. They compete for attention in the same conversation about how to trust AI-written code, but not really for the same purchase decision.
There’s no official integration today. In principle, Pulse speaks MCP like any other tool, so nothing structurally prevents an Augment Expert from being pointed at a Pulse board. That’s a possibility worth testing, not a supported workflow either company documents.
Because it’s built around a different model: risk-scored triage plus one human approval checkpoint per unit of work, not a per-task threshold a customer configures. Augment’s Review Fleet is real and does a lot of work, it’s just structured differently from an enforced gate.
Pulse is free, with no published paid tier. Augment’s Standard plan is $20 a month flat for up to 50 seats with $20 of usage included; Business is $100 a month for up to 50 seats with $100 included. Usage beyond that is billed at the LLM provider’s list price plus a 40% service fee, plus compute.
Not the same thing, and Augment isn’t fully open source either, its CLI and platform are closed source and cloud-hosted. Pulse is source available under the Elastic License 2.0: free to read, run, and modify, not resellable as a hosted service by a third party.
Free to run locally, no account required, works with the coding agent you already have.
“Augment Code” and “Cosmos” are trademarks of Augment Inc. References to Augment Code on this page are for comparison purposes only, based on its public documentation, pricing page, and website as of August 2026, plus publicly reported funding and revenue figures from third-party sources, and do not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by Augment Inc.