A coding agent control plane is the surface that runs several coding agents, isolates their work, and gets the result reviewed. Four products define the field in August 2026: T3 Code, Conductor, Factory, and Continuum. Scored purely on team readiness across identity, billing, spend control, policy, audit, and support, they land in three tiers. T3 Code scores zero on every axis by design and is free. Conductor and Factory bring the traditional enterprise controls, with Conductor holding SAML SSO and SCIM and Factory holding the certifications and deployment patterns. Continuum is strongest on enforced spend control and cost attribution and weakest on identity, having no directory federation today. There is no product that wins every axis, and pretending otherwise is how evaluations go wrong.
- Score team readiness separately from agent quality. They correlate badly and only one of them blocks a rollout.
- Six axes: identity, billing, spend control, model policy, audit, and accountability.
- T3 Code scores zero on all six, and that is not a criticism. It is free and un-monetized on purpose.
- Conductor holds the identity axis with SAML SSO and SCIM in its enterprise tier.
- Factory holds accountability with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, and airgapped deployment.
- Continuum holds spend control with caps that refuse requests, and loses the identity axis outright.
- The tiebreaker is usually which axis is a hard gate in your review, not which product scores highest overall.
What a control plane is, and why readiness is its own axis
A coding agent control plane sits above the agents rather than replacing them. You bring Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok, or OpenCode, and the control plane gives you a place to run several of them at once, isolation so they do not collide, a review surface for what they produced, and a way to operate the whole thing from more than one machine. The agentic development environment guide covers the category definition; this page is only about whether you can deploy one to a team.
Team readiness deserves its own scoring because it correlates so weakly with everything else. The product with the best isolation model might have no concept of a user. The product with a full audit pipeline might have a worse review loop. And crucially, readiness changes slowly while agent quality changes monthly, so a readiness score stays useful long after a model benchmark has expired.
| Axis | The question | What a failing score means |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | Can access be granted and removed centrally? | Offboarding is manual and unprovable |
| Billing | Is there one bill the organization holds? | Finance receives N expense reports |
| Spend control | Can a request be refused at a budget ceiling? | You find the ceiling when work stops |
| Model policy | Can you deny a model org-wide and have it hold? | Policy is a document, not a control |
| Audit | Can a reviewer answer what agents did last month? | The record is on a laptop, if anywhere |
| Accountability | Is there a counterparty with a commitment? | No DPA, no SLA, no indemnity |
The field, scored
Four products, six axes, checked against vendor documentation in August 2026. Where a control is real but reached through an engagement rather than a setting, the cell says so.
| Axis | T3 Code | Conductor | Factory | Continuum |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Identity | Absent | SAML SSO and SCIM at Enterprise | Enterprise identity and policy enforcement | Partial. WorkOS sign-in, no federation |
| Billing | Absent | Centralized billing at Teams, POs at Enterprise | Enterprise agreement | One subscription by live member count |
| Spend control | Absent | Not published as a cap control | Retention and managed settings, analytics API | Weekly caps that return a 429 |
| Model policy | Absent | Not published | Managed settings govern models and MCP allowlists | Allow and deny at three scopes |
| Audit | Local threads only | Admin portal at Teams | Audit logging, OTel export, analytics API | Per-session tool calls and URLs, org-scoped |
| Accountability | Absent by design | DPA, SLA, dedicated channels at Enterprise | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001 | Dedicated account management at Enterprise |
| Product | Entry cost | Team or enterprise cost |
|---|---|---|
| T3 Code | $0, MIT licensed | No paid tier exists |
| Conductor | $0 on Free, $50 per month Pro | $60 per user per month Teams. Enterprise on request |
| Factory | Individual plans from $20 per month | Enterprise on request |
| Continuum | $0 for the app, bring your own keys | From $25 per member per month, billed by live member count |
Read the two tables together rather than separately. T3 Code costs nothing and scores nothing, which is a coherent position. Conductor and Continuum are within a factor of two or three on price and score on almost opposite axes. Factory is the enterprise-first entry and prices accordingly. None of the four dominates.
Reading the scorecard
Three observations that the grid does not make obvious.
- The identity axis and the spend axis rarely appear together. Products that came from an enterprise sales motion ship SSO early and treat cost as a reporting problem. Products that came from a developer-cost motion ship enforced caps early and treat identity as a login screen. If you need both enforced today, expect to compromise on one.
- "Not published" is not "absent". Several cells above say a vendor does not publish a control. That is a research finding, not a product judgement. Ask them directly, and ask for a demonstration.
- An engagement is not a feature. On-prem deployment, network allow lists, and custom security settings frequently sit behind a sales conversation across this whole field. Budget calendar time for that, not just money.
The practical consequence is that the winner is decided by which axis is a hard gate in your specific review rather than by total score. A regulated financial buyer with a SAML mandate has a one-product shortlist. A fifty-person startup whose actual pain is a tripling API bill has a different one-product shortlist. Both are correct.
Three buyers, three answers
The team with no organization problem
Under about ten engineers, everyone trusted, no customer security questionnaires, cost is visible because it is small. Use T3 Code. It is free, actively developed, ships on Linux and Android, and buying controls for this team is buying administration. Revisit when you can no longer answer what last month cost without opening several dashboards. The T3 Code teams page has the thresholds.
The team whose review has a hard identity gate
If SAML or SCIM is written into your policy as a requirement rather than a preference, that eliminates most of this field immediately. Conductor sells both in its Enterprise tier. Factory documents enterprise identity and policy enforcement alongside its certifications. Start there, and treat everything else as a secondary criterion.
The team whose problem is the bill and the blast radius
If the pain is that nobody can attribute spend and nothing stops a runaway session, the identity axis is not your binding constraint. You want per-person keys, enforced weekly ceilings, an approval path, and a ledger that attributes cost by person, model, team, and key. That is where Continuum is strongest, and the organizations page lists both what it enforces and what it does not.
A fourth case worth naming: teams that need two of these at once. Because every product in this category brings its own agent subscriptions rather than reselling tokens, running two control planes is genuinely viable. Keep T3 Code where forkability, Linux, or Android decides it, and put the governed layer where the money and the audit trail have to be answerable. That is not a hedge, it is a reasonable architecture.
How to run the comparison yourself
Do not start with a trial. Start with elimination, then test only what survives.
- Write your six axis requirements as enforced, wanted, or irrelevant. Most teams find only one or two are genuinely enforced requirements.
- Eliminate on the enforced rows before installing anything. This is fifteen minutes of reading vendor documentation.
- For each survivor, ask for a live demonstration of one refusal: a blocked model or a request stopped at a budget ceiling. Watch for the error.
- Run one repository, three engineers, two weeks, per finalist. Same tickets. Shorter measures novelty rather than fit.
- Hand the audit export to a security reviewer without narration and ask if they can answer a question from it.
- Offboard a pilot participant for real and time how long proving revocation takes.
- Compare totals: subscription, inference, administration time, migration. Use the team cost calculator for the first two and estimate the rest honestly.
If you want the deeper cuts on individual products, we have full coverage of T3 Code, Factory, and Conductor and its alternatives, plus the general agent comparison for the axis this page deliberately ignores.
Questions people ask
What is a coding agent control plane?
A surface that runs several coding agents under the subscriptions you already hold, isolates each conversation’s work, usually in its own git branch or worktree, and gives you one place to review and ship the result. It is not a model, an IDE, or an autocomplete tool.
Which coding agent control plane is best for teams?
There is no single answer, because the products score on opposite axes. If SAML SSO or SCIM is a hard requirement, Conductor sells both. If certifications and airgapped deployment decide it, Factory. If enforced spend caps and cost attribution decide it, Continuum. If nothing is a hard requirement, T3 Code is free and very good.
Is a free control plane good enough for a team?
Frequently, yes. Up to roughly ten engineers with no external security obligations, the absence of org controls costs less than the tools save. It stops being true at the point where somebody has to answer where the money went or prove a departing engineer’s credentials are dead.
Can we run more than one control plane?
Yes, and it is more practical here than in most categories, because none of these products resells tokens. Every one of them sits on top of subscriptions you hold, so the choice can be made per team or per project instead of as an organization-wide commitment.
What is the difference between an audit log and session history?
Scope and durability. Session history is what one user’s machine remembers. An audit log is org-scoped, retained on a defined schedule, and exportable to someone who was not in the session. Ask for the retention window and the export format together, because one without the other fails a real review.
Does Continuum support SSO?
No, not today. Sign-in and invitations run on WorkOS AuthKit with Google and Apple login, and there is no directory federation or SCIM. This page scores that as a partial on the identity axis rather than a pass, which is the honest reading.
How do I test whether a spend cap is real?
Set a low cap in a trial organization and run work past it. A real cap refuses the request with an error, in Continuum’s case a 429 carrying a budget-exhausted reason. A reporting feature sends a notification and lets the request through, which is a very different purchase.
Sources
Every figure above was read from these pages on August 2026. Vendors reprice without notice; if you find a stale number, tell us.