agents-deck vs Conductor

An honest comparison, row by row, following the comparison table on our landing page. As of August 2026. Corrections welcome.

Conductor, by Melty Labs, is a free Mac app that runs multiple Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor agents in parallel, each in its own git worktree, with a dashboard to watch, review, and merge their work. Bring your own API key and it costs nothing.

Credit where due: of every tool in this category, Conductor is the closest thing to a “deck”. The at-a-glance view plus review plus merge/PR loop is genuinely good. If you are a solo Mac user running Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor, it may be all you need.

agents-deck makes a different bet on the same substrate (agents in git worktrees): the hard problem is not running agents in parallel, it is keeping them observable, safe, and on-process, across tools and platforms. Not another way to run agents in parallel, but a way to keep them honest.

Live observability dashboard

Conductor: partial. A real at-a-glance dashboard, but it lives inside a macOS app. If your team is on Linux or Windows, or you want the deck on a second screen served from a box in the corner, you are out of luck.

agents-deck: yes. A live, browser-based dashboard you self-host, on any OS, showing every agent across tools and projects: who is working, who is stuck, who is waiting for your input.

Cross-tool (Claude · Codex · Cursor…)

Conductor: partial. Three tools now: Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. Conductor added Cursor after we first wrote this page, closing part of the gap.

agents-deck: yes. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Kimi, across multiple repos. One deck.

Human approval, not `--yolo`

Conductor: yes. The review and merge/PR flow keeps a human in the loop, and Conductor gets this right. Most local orchestrators do isolation and review; this row is not where the two products differ much.

agents-deck: yes. Approvals plus awaiting-input alerts, so an agent that needs a human never sits ignored in a hidden tab.

Process guardrails / governance

Conductor: no. Like almost every tool in this category, Conductor reviews the output (the diff), not the process that produced it.

agents-deck: yes. Built-in validators enforce the process itself: skills with evidence, message banners, status-flip read confirmations, per-agent file jurisdiction. Almost no one does this; it is the reason agents-deck exists.

Git-native audit · zero database

Conductor: no. Your audit trail is whatever the app shows you.

agents-deck: yes. State is YAML in the repo; the audit trail is git log. Zero database. The repo is the storage. That makes evidence for EU AI Act or ISO 42001 conversations a byproduct of just using the tool.

Cross-session memory & handoff

Conductor: partial. Worktrees and history persist, but coordination context is not designed as a durable, shareable record.

agents-deck: yes. Tickets, messages, changelog, and roadmap live in the repo. A new session, or a different tool, picks up exactly where the last one left off.

Self-hosted

Conductor: partial. It is a local app, which is respectable, but it is bound to one Mac, not something you deploy for a team.

agents-deck: yes. Self-hosted anywhere, no account, no external service, zero database.

Price

Both free. Conductor is free with your own API keys. The agents-deck core is free and open source, and stays that way: dashboard, tickets, messages, changelog, guardrails, CLI, MCP.

Choose Conductor if

You work on a Mac and want a polished native app.
Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor are the only agents you run.
You mainly want parallel worktrees with a good review and merge flow.

Choose agents-deck if

Your machines are not all Macs, or you want the deck served in a browser.
You run more than two tools, or several projects, and want one view of all of them.
You want process guardrails and approvals, not just a diff review at the end.
You want an audit trail that survives in git log, not in an app.

Also comparing?

Source for the Conductor side: the official site at conductor.build, re-checked August 2026 (first written May 2026). If we got something wrong, tell us and we will fix it.