Runtime vs Ona

The core difference

Ona (formerly Gitpod) is an enterprise dev environment platform. It gives engineering teams sandboxed, pre-configured development environments with OS-level isolation, organizational guardrails, and compliance features. It's built for professional software engineers at large companies.

Runtime makes AI coding agents accessible to your entire organization. Engineers, PMs, designers, and growth teams all prompt Claude Code or Codex in a cloud sandbox with live preview. You get the same security and sandboxing, but anyone on your team can use it, not just engineers.

Why teams choose Runtime over Ona

Your whole team can build, not just engineers

Ona is designed for developers. The setup, the interface, the workflows all assume engineering knowledge. Non-engineers can't use it.

Runtime is built for everyone on your team. PMs can prompt an agent to build from a PRD. Designers can iterate on UI with live preview. Growth teams can ship landing pages and experiments. The interface is as simple as typing what you want and watching it build. No terminal knowledge required.

Simple enough for anyone, powerful enough for engineers

Ona requires engineering setup: configuring environments, managing policies, understanding the development lifecycle. It's infrastructure for developers, by developers.

Runtime is as easy as Lovable or Replit but with full-stack control underneath. Your growth lead can prompt "build a landing page for our Q2 campaign" and deploy it. Your engineer can import a monorepo with 200 packages and run Claude Code in autopilot. Same platform, different entry points.

Live preview built in

Ona focuses on the development environment itself. You get a VS Code-like experience in the browser, but seeing what you're building requires running dev servers and understanding the stack.

Runtime shows a live preview of your app as the agent builds it. Watch components appear, see data flow, test interactions. This is what makes it accessible to non-engineers and useful for stakeholders who want to see progress in real-time.

Zero to production, not just existing repos

Ona is optimized for working on existing codebases. Pre-configured environments, repo-specific settings, automated setup. It's excellent for large engineering organizations maintaining complex software.

Runtime works equally well for greenfield projects. Start from blank, describe what you want, and have a deployed app in minutes. Most growth and marketing teams are building new things, not maintaining existing repos. Runtime handles both.

When Ona makes sense

• You're a large engineering organization (Fortune 500, banks, pharma)
• You need SOC2, GDPR, and enterprise compliance out of the box
• Your users are exclusively professional software engineers
• You're focused on standardizing dev environments for a large eng team
• You need deep IDE integration (VS Code, Vim, Cursor)

When Runtime makes sense

• You want your entire org to build with AI agents, not just engineering
• You need something as simple as Lovable but with full-stack control
• Non-engineers (PMs, designers, growth) need to prompt, iterate, and ship
• You build zero-to-one projects as much as you work on existing repos
• You want live preview, multiplayer, and background agents
• You're open source first and want to self-host

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