Harmony, Conductor and Claude Squad: Three Ways to Run Coding Agents in Parallel

Running several coding agents at once has gone from a trick to a normal way to work, and a few tools now exist for it. This post compares three: Claude Squad, Conductor and Harmony (ours). Everything said about Claude Squad and Conductor comes from their own public pages, read on 7 October 2026 and linked below. Where their pages do not say something, we do not guess. Products change; check their pages for the current picture.

Claude Squad

Claude Squad describes itself as a terminal app that manages multiple Claude Code, Codex, Gemini and other local agents, Aider included, in separate workspaces. It isolates each agent two ways: tmux gives each one its own terminal session, and a git worktree gives each one its own branch. It can run tasks in the background, including in an auto-accept mode, pause and resume sessions, and commit and push a session's branch. It is open source under AGPL-3.0 and installs with Homebrew or a short script. Source: github.com/smtg-ai/claude-squad, read 2026-10-07.

Conductor

Conductor runs parallel coding agents on your Mac. Its documentation lists Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode, and says each task gets its own workspace, branch, files, terminal, diff and review path, so you see what each agent is doing and then review and merge its changes. Its pricing page lists a free plan for individuals with multiple coding agents and local workspaces, a paid Pro plan adding cloud workspaces, multiplayer and a mobile app, and Teams and Enterprise plans. Its pages we read do not mention Windows or Linux. Sources: conductor.build, its documentation and pricing, read 2026-10-07.

Harmony

Harmony is a free desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux. Each agent runs in a real terminal tab using the CLI and subscription you already have: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok, Kimi, Gemini, Devin, OpenCode or your own. Agents can work in their own worktrees, share one task board, and message each other across providers, and those messages survive a restart. Sessions keep running when you close the window. Starting a new agent or a risky action waits for your approval by default. A command-line client and an MCP server drive the same workspace. Harmony Pro, a paid plan in early access, runs your agents on a hosted machine after the laptop closes; pricing has the current price.

The differences that matter

• **Where it runs.** Claude Squad lives in your terminal. Conductor is a Mac app. Harmony is a desktop app on Windows, macOS and Linux.
• **How agents relate.** Claude Squad and Conductor keep each agent in its own workspace for you to review. Harmony also gives the agents a shared task board and messages between them, so one can pick up another's finished work.
• **What it costs.** Claude Squad is free and open source. Conductor and Harmony are free locally, with paid plans for cloud workspaces; see Conductor's pricing and ours for current prices.

Where Claude Squad is the better choice

If you live in tmux, want something small and open source, and mainly need several agents isolated on their own branches, Claude Squad does that with very little ceremony.

Where Conductor is the better choice

If you work on a Mac and want a polished review-and-merge flow for each agent's changes, or a team plan with an admin portal and single sign-on, Conductor offers those today. Harmony has no team plan.

Where Harmony is the better choice

If you are on Windows or Linux, use a mix of providers, or want agents to coordinate through a shared board and messages instead of you relaying between them, that is what Harmony is for.

To be precise about how finished Harmony is: the workspace, task board, messaging and worktrees ship today as preview features, and fully autonomous multi-agent runs are still experimental. The Windows installer is not code-signed yet. The features page labels every capability with its status.

If that fits how you work, download Harmony. If one of the others fits better, use it; the setup in How to Run Several Claude Code Agents at Once works with any of them.