the honest comparison
agentproto vs Paseo, Claude Squad, Conductor, Agent Farm
The honest framing first. Paseo is the one real shape-competitor here: also a local daemon, also multi-provider, with polished desktop and mobile clients and voice control. Where we differ is the center of gravity. Paseo is built around a human steering agents from any device; agentproto is built around supervision: per-turn policy gates, commits staged behind a human ack, role-gated nested orchestration, and an open spec family underneath. Apache-2.0 vs AGPL matters too if you want to embed the daemon in your own product.
The other three are not really competitors. Claude Squad, Conductor and Agent Farm are interactive tools a human sits inside of to run several coding-agent sessions at once, and they are good at that. agentproto is a daemon with a programmatic lifecycle you call from code, from another agent, or from cron. The supervision primitives it adds, including durable policy gates, multiplexed fan-in monitoring and nested orchestration, are not present in the other three.
| Dimension | agentproto | Paseo | Claude Squad | Conductor | Agent Farm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agents supported | Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, opencode, Mastra (Code + Agent), claude-sdk (Anthropic/Moonshot/OpenRouter), OpenClaw and browser-as-agent. All use uniform AIP-45 manifests. | Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, OpenCode and Pi, plus custom providers (custom binaries, ACP agents, Anthropic-compatible endpoints) | Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Aider, other local agents | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor | Claude Code only (by design) |
| Interface | Daemon with CLI, HTTP and MCP surfaces. Scriptable from code, another agent or cron, with no terminal required | Daemon plus desktop, iOS/Android, web and CLI clients; voice control for steering from any device | Interactive terminal TUI (human sits in it) | Mac desktop app (human sits in it) | Python script / batch CLI |
| Isolation | Daemon-tracked sessions; git-worktree isolation; sandbox provider family landing (local shipped, e2b microVM in progress) | Git worktree per run (--worktree); official Docker image; remote daemon (--host) | tmux session per agent + git worktree per branch | Isolated workspace per agent | tmux panes + lock-based file coordination |
| Programmatic API | Yes: spawn, prompt, monitor, kill and export over MCP or HTTP; fan-in monitoring; usage and cost introspection | Partial: CLI verbs (run/ls/attach/send) plus a WebSocket API; primarily driven from its own clients | No: TUI app | No: desktop app | Partial: configurable script, not a long-lived API |
| Durable supervision / policy gates | Yes: shell or LLM-judge gate on turn-end, event bus and commit gated on human ack. Survives client disconnect | Partial: remote approval of agents' own permission prompts, plus a Ralph-loop skill with optional verifier. No daemon-side turn-end gates or commit staging | No: human watches the TUI | No: human reviews in the app | Partial: workload watchdog (auto-restart), not per-turn gates |
| Nested orchestration | Yes: scoped sub-gateways, executor/supervisor role gating, depth and child-count caps | Partial: handoff, committee and advisor skills between agents; no role gating or depth caps | No | No | Partial: fans one workload across N agents |
| MCP surface | Yes: the daemon is an MCP server with about 175 tools; agents can mount external MCP servers | Yes: daemon MCP server (opt-in config); drivable from Claude Desktop/Code or any MCP client | No | No | No |
| Your own tools, shared with every agent | Yes: author a tool once (TOOL contract + DRIVER implementation), the daemon serves it over MCP to every agent; external MCP servers can be imported and handed to any agent at spawn | No: the daemon injects only its own control tools (agents, terminals, schedules, permissions) into agents | No | No | No |
| Scheduled / recurring runs | Yes: workflows (staged concurrency, schema-validated outputs and cost ceilings) plus durable cron on the daemon | Yes: recurring schedules on an agent, with run history, manageable over MCP | No | No | Partial: batch runs, not scheduled |
| License / platform | Apache-2.0: cross-platform daemon + CLI (macOS + Linux verified) | AGPL-3.0: cross-platform, desktop + mobile apps; solo-maintained | AGPL-3.0: cross-platform TUI (requires tmux + gh) | Closed source: macOS only | MIT: cross-platform (Python 3.13+, tmux, Claude Code) |
Facts sourced from each project's own page, 2026-07-07 (Paseo: 2026-07-13). Corrections welcome. File an issue.
When to use which
- Paseo: you want to steer agents from your phone or by voice, across desktop and mobile, with a polished cross-device experience.
- Claude Squad: you want a terminal cockpit for a handful of parallel sessions with git worktrees, reviewing each by hand.
- Conductor: same workflow, polished Mac app, across Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.
- Agent Farm: you have a lint/type-fix queue and want to throw ~50 Claude Code instances at it and get an HTML report.
- agentproto: you want to drive coding agents from code or cron, with gates that survive a client disconnect, fan-in monitoring over N sessions, and children that can be granted their own scoped orchestration gateway.
They can compose
agentproto does not replace the cockpits. A tool like Claude Squad or Conductor could mount the agentproto MCP server and get durable policy gates and multiplexed monitoring for free, instead of hand-rolling a tmux + Redis watchdog around its panes. Interactive cockpit on top, supervised daemon underneath, any adapter either side wants to drive.