Comparison

Conductor alternatives

Conductor is closed source, it runs on macOS only, and Pro is $50 a month on top of an existing Claude plan.

This page went up on 16 October 2026. The prices come from conductor.build/pricing read on 17 October, and the star counts and commit dates were read again on 23 October 2026 UTC.

The three closest alternatives to Conductor

Orca, Emdash and Nimbalyst are open source with native Windows and Linux builds, and of the twenty-two tools below Orca has by far the largest community at 102,844 stars.

What Conductor gives for the money

The pricing page describes the free tier as "Local workspaces on your Mac", and Pro adds cloud workspaces that keep agents running when the laptop is shut, along with a mobile app. Behind all of it is a funded company that has raised a Series A.

Free costs $0, Pro $50/mo, Teams $60/mo per user, and Enterprise is priced on request.

What people actually object to about Conductor

Platform. A Mac-only app is no use to somebody whose work machine runs Windows.

Price. $50 a month is not expensive for a work tool, and it sits on top of a Claude subscription.

Opacity. This is software that runs commands inside somebody's repository, and some people want to read what it does before letting it do that, which closed source rules out.

Twenty-two alternatives, as of 17 October 2026

Other "Conductor alternative" pages list four to nine tools and copy the list from each other. A pass through the GitHub API that reads the licence and last commit of every candidate turns up twenty-two.

Four of the twenty-two are dead or no longer orchestrators

Vibe Kanban is on most of these lists and is sunsetting, announced 10 April 2026. Crystal is deprecated, and its description now reads "Crystal is now Nimbalyst". Terragon is dead and says so, and cmux has turned into a macOS terminal rather than an orchestrator.

All four still get recommended in articles written this year.

Agentbox against Conductor, feature by feature

Why Agentbox is free

Agentbox runs on the local machine, so there is nothing to operate and nothing to charge for. No server of its own holds the code, there is no account system, and it pays for no inference, because the agents bill to an existing Claude Code or Codex subscription.

Conductor charges because Pro runs agents in its own cloud, which is a real expense and not a markup on free software. Anthropic now folds the same thing into a Claude subscription, so the comparison is no longer free against paid. For agents that keep working while a laptop is shut, somebody has to pay for the machine they run on.

When Conductor is the better choice

• Agents that keep working when the laptop is shut. Conductor has cloud workspaces on Pro. Agentbox does not, and nothing else on the free side of this table does either, but Claude Code's own cloud sessions do, on the Pro or Max plan a reader of this page already pays for and with no separate charge for the machine.
• Checking on work from a phone. Pro includes a mobile app, and Agentbox has nothing here today.
• Buying for a team. There is a Teams plan, seats, and a company to send the invoice.
• Support and a roadmap worth relying on. A funded company is a real answer to that, and a four-week-old project with 94 stars is not.
• The most polished Mac app in the category. Conductor has had much longer to make it so.

When Agentbox is the better choice

• No second subscription. Agentbox is free and bills nothing beyond an existing Claude or Codex plan.
• Reading the source. GPL-3.0, all of it.
• Not on a Mac. npx agentbox-app serves it on 127.0.0.1 on any platform with Node 22.
• No account and no server. Nothing to sign into, nothing to send the code to.
• Codex as well as Claude Code. Both are first class.

Questions people ask before switching

Is there a free Conductor alternative?

Most of the table is free, and Conductor itself has a free tier with local workspaces. The question is usually about the $50 Pro plan, which buys cloud workspaces and the mobile app.

Is there an open-source Conductor alternative?

Yes, and plenty. MIT, Apache-2.0, AGPL-3.0 and GPL-3.0 all appear in the table. Two entries are source-available rather than open source, which the table marks, because people searching for this mean the licence and not the price.

What about Conductor on Windows?

There is none. The alternatives with native Windows builds are Orca, Emdash, Nimbalyst, Nezha, opcode and harnss.

What about Conductor on Linux?

The same list, plus the terminal interfaces and anything that runs in a browser. Agentbox installs on Linux from a checkout and adds a launcher entry.

Will I lose my work switching?

No. These tools drive the same Claude Code against the same repositories, and the branches are ordinary git branches.

Do I have to pick one?

No, and running two for a week is the only honest way to choose. They can point at the same repository as long as the same task does not run twice.

Which is fastest?

None of them to a noticeable degree, because the time goes on the model rather than the interface. Three agents running together took 17.1 seconds against 16.4 for one alone, and the harness and the load average are written up there.

What happens to my repository?

A worktree per task and a branch per task, each one to merge or delete. The folders outlive the agents, so clearing them out becomes a habit.

Moving from Conductor to Agentbox, with the commands

There is no export and no import, because neither tool owns the work. Moving across amounts to pointing the new tool at the folder the old one was already working in.

What Conductor left behind

$ git worktree list
/Users/you/app              4a1c9f2 [main]
/Users/you/app-feature-x    8b31e07 [feature-x]

$ git branch --no-merged main
  feature-x

Anything unmerged there is work in progress, and it is worth finishing or merging before the switch, because two tools creating worktrees in different places on one repository is how people lose track of a branch.

Starting Agentbox on the same repository

$ npx agentbox-app
Agentbox is running at http://127.0.0.1:51734/?k=9f3c2a

It takes the same folder Conductor was pointed at, and makes .claude/worktrees/<task id> per task with a branch of the same name, so nothing it creates collides with anything Conductor created.

Going back to Conductor

$ git worktree list --porcelain | awk '/^worktree /{print $2}' | grep .claude/worktrees
$ git worktree remove <each one>
$ git worktree prune

Deleting the app afterwards leaves nothing behind, because there is no account to close, Agentbox holds no data anywhere, and the repository is exactly as it was.

What cannot move from Conductor

Conductor's cloud workspaces are the one thing Agentbox has no equivalent for, so anything running in its cloud has to finish there or be restarted locally.

Is Conductor worth $50 a month?

Less often than it used to be, because Claude Code now runs cloud sessions on the Pro and Max plans at no extra charge, which is the thing the $50 mostly bought. What is left for the money is the polish, the mobile app, the multiplayer and somebody to invoice. When the agents only ever run locally on a Mac, the $50 buys polish, which is a real thing to want.

Does any free tool have cloud agents?

Terragon did and is dead. A box somebody already owns is the usual answer, which is what the browser and self-hosted options are for.

Running Conductor and Agentbox side by side costs nothing

Agentbox puts each task in .claude/worktrees/ on its own branch, so existing branches are untouched.

What switching tools will not fix

Switching tools changes what shows up on screen and when a person gets interrupted.

Reading the diffs. Five finished agents mean five changes to review, and that is the slowest part of the loop in every tool on the list. One interface can put the diff in front of a reviewer faster than another, but none of them can say whether the change is right, and Agentbox is no exception.

Writing the task. A vague instruction produces a vague branch, and running several agents at once multiplies that rather than fixing it. The teams getting the most out of this write smaller, sharper tasks rather than more of them.

The plan's limits. No interface changes what a Claude or Codex tier allows, so if ten agents trip a rate limit they trip it everywhere, and paying $50 for a front end does not buy more model.

Where every number on this page came from

On 17 October 2026, every number in the table came off the GitHub API.

$ for r in stablyai/orca generalaction/emdash nimbalyst/nimbalyst; do
    gh api repos/$r --jq '"\(.full_name) \(.stargazers_count) \(.pushed_at[0:10])"'
  done
stablyai/orca 95206 2026-10-17
generalaction/emdash 6019 2026-10-17
nimbalyst/nimbalyst 1917 2026-10-17

The prices came off Conductor's own pricing page the same day, and platform support off each project's README.

Where Agentbox loses

Agentbox has 94 stars against Orca's 102,844 and is four weeks old, with no native Windows build, no mobile app, no cloud and no company standing behind it. If any one of those is the thing that matters, the table above says who to use instead.