cto.new vs SWE-2: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of cto.new and SWE-2 — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

cto.new

Unknown (cto.new)

Free

A cto.new landing/shortcut page that links to a Product Hunt listing for CTO-focused resources.

Provides a web landing URL at cto.new/product-hunt that links to a Product Hunt listing
Acts as a short/vanity URL for CTO-focused resources or product listing
Simple static landing behavior (redirect or informational page) based on available content
No public API or integration details present in the provided content
No SDKs, plugins, or platform-specific installers documented

Cognition

Paid

Cognition's coding model that scores 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main at 64% lower cost than comparable frontier models.

Pareto-Frontier Cost Efficiency: Matches GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5/5.1 on coding benchmarks at a fraction of their price and comes within a few points of GPT-6 Astra at roughly a quarter of the cost.
Single-Run Multi-Effort RL: A reinforcement learning algorithm trains all reasoning-effort levels in one run, applying a per-level linear cost penalty derived from the base model's local frontier slope.
Focused Codebase Exploration: Stronger engineering judgment lets the model decide which parts of a repository matter, cutting mean steps per run from 127 to 53 at medium effort.
Selectable Effort Levels: Ships medium, high and max reasoning settings so teams can trade additional steps and cost for accuracy on harder tasks.
End-to-End Test Writing: Produces tests that validate an implementation end to end, catching regressions and edge cases more reliably than previous SWE models.
Resourceful Task Recovery: When an expected route is blocked — an unavailable MCP integration, for example — it finds an alternative path to the same answer within the user's stated boundaries.
Efficient Training and Serving Stack: NVFP4/FP8 kernels, quantization-aware training and an online draft model cut memory use and train-inference mismatch despite nearly 3x the base parameters of SWE-1.7.
Hardened Verifier Flywheel: Triples the number of RL environments, adds instruction-following overlays, and uses earlier SWE-2 checkpoints to iteratively strengthen verifiers.

Agentic Software Engineering: Powering Devin sessions that plan, edit, build and test changes across a real repository with minimal supervision.
Cost-Sensitive Coding at Scale: Teams running large volumes of automated coding tasks pick a model that holds frontier-adjacent accuracy at a materially lower per-task cost.
Terminal and Tooling Workflows: Strong Terminal-Bench results suit tasks driven through shell commands, build systems and command-line tooling.
Regression Test Generation: Generating end-to-end tests for existing implementations to catch edge cases before a release.
Effort-Tiered Task Routing: Routing simple tickets to medium effort and hard migrations to high or max effort within the same model deployment.
Benchmark and Model Evaluation: Engineering leaders compare coding model options on published FrontierCode, DeepSWE and Terminal-Bench numbers alongside cost.