#thinslice vs Ona

Ona is the product formerly called Gitpod. Gitpod rebranded to Ona in September 2025 and repositioned as an "AI software engineer". Ona is a cloud platform that runs its own background agents inside vendor-hosted development environments, and it bills by usage.

thinslice is a CLI that binds each git worktree to its own bag of runtime state — dedicated Postgres, Redis, ports, and config. It runs as native processes on your own machine. You bring your own agent. It is free and source available, on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

#Local processes vs a rented cloud IDE

Ona runs your work in a cloud environment that Ona operates. The environment is a rented server. You reach it through a browser or a connected editor.

thinslice runs on the machine in front of you. Each slice new or slice tmp forks a native process — the cold start is a process fork, so it is near instant. There is no VM to boot and no environment to provision. It works with no network, on a plane or behind a firewall.

The rebrand did not change where the code runs. Ona is still your code on a server that someone else owns and meters.

#Your agent vs their agent

Ona centers on Ona Agents, its own agents running in its own platform.

thinslice is agent-agnostic. It sets environment variables — the database URL, the port, the config path — that any CLI agent reads automatically. Use Claude Code, use Codex, use anything that runs in a terminal. You pick the model and the agent, with your own credentials. thinslice makes the environment consistent and stays out of the model call.

#Cost

Ona meters usage. The Core plan starts at $20 per month and includes a pool of Ona Compute Units (OCUs) that cover agent tokens and environment time (as of August 2026). Running a GPU VM costs 7 OCUs per hour, for example. Monthly credits expire at the end of the billing month. When agents run in parallel for hours, the meter runs with them.

thinslice is free. The state bags run on hardware you already own. Ten parallel worktrees cost the same as one: nothing. Your only model cost is what your own agent already bills to your own account.

#Inspectable state

A thinslice state bag is a plain named directory on your disk. To inspect it, cd into it. Run pg_dump on its Postgres cluster, rsync its files, or open its config in an editor. The database, the cache, and the ports are all local and all yours to read directly.

An Ona environment lives inside the vendor platform. You inspect it through the tools the platform exposes.

#CLI

thinslice is a CLI first:

# Create a worktree with its own db, redis, and ports
slice new feature/add-search

# Spawn a throwaway worktree cloned from the current slice, hand it to any agent
slice tmp --from current claude -p "add full-text search to the products table"

# List all slices and their state
slice ls

# Attach to an existing slice
slice attach feature/add-search

slice tmp --from current clones the current state bag into a fresh worktree, so the agent starts with real data and a working dev environment. When the agent exits, thinslice discards the throwaway. You can clone, detach, and reattach a state bag across sessions.

#Change the tool itself

thinslice ships as a collection of shell scripts. The files that run are the files you installed. There is no compiled binary and no build step between you and the tool.

If you want a command to work differently, ask your coding agent to edit the installed scripts. The change is live on the next run. Most tools stop you at this point: fork the repository, install the toolchain, build, and then test. thinslice also includes a built-in path to send your change upstream.

Ona is a hosted platform. You cannot change how it works.

#Platforms

thinslice runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows as native processes. Ona runs in the browser and connected editors against its cloud environments.

#Comparison