where it differs, including where it loses

Compared

swe-mux sits in a crowded category and does not win most of it. This page says what each of the neighbouring tools does, from that tool's own documentation, and marks the rows where swe-mux is behind as plainly as the rows where it is ahead.

Every cell names its source and the page carries the date those sources were read. Where the sources did not settle a question the answer is unclear rather than a guess. Several of these projects are young and move quickly, so check the date before trusting a row, and open an issue if a cell about your project is wrong. It will be fixed rather than argued about.

What each of these is

They are not the same kind of thing, which is the first thing a comparison table hides. Read this before the matrix.

  • swe-muxA local daemon that owns pseudoterminals, with a browser UI and a phone client in front of it, plus an evidence layer over what the agents did. Windows-first, Apache-2.0.
  • HerdrA single Rust binary that multiplexes terminals inside your existing terminal and reads agent state into a sidebar. Apache-2.0.
  • tmuxThe terminal multiplexer everything in this category is measured against. It is here as the baseline, not as a competitor: it predates coding agents by twenty years and is not trying to understand them.
  • OrcaA desktop agent development environment with an editor, a built-in browser, mobile apps, and a worktree per task. MIT.
  • ConductorA Mac app that runs parallel Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor agents in isolated git worktrees, with a hosted cloud tier.
  • SupersetA local-first desktop workspace for orchestrating any CLI agent, one git worktree per task, aiming at very large agent counts. Source-available under the Elastic License.
  • WarpA terminal, an agent CLI, and cloud agent infrastructure. The client is open source; the platform around it is a paid service.

How to read this

Three things the matrix cannot say, and they matter more than most of the rows.

  • A phone client is not a phone clientOrca ships iOS and Android apps and calls them companions; swe-mux's claim is parity, meaning nothing functional exists on the desktop and not on the phone. Those are different products in the same cell, and the row cannot tell you which one you want.
  • Breadth is not depthOrca and Herdr recognize more agent CLIs than swe-mux does, and if the CLI you use is on their list and not in swe-mux's registry, that is the row that decides it. Every CLI still runs in swe-mux as an ordinary terminal program; what it does not get is the layer on top.
  • Not built is not the same as not yet builtswe-mux has no hosted runners and no team features, and both are deliberately not on the roadmap rather than pending. If you want either, two of the tools above have them today.

Nothing on this page is a benchmark. No tool here was run side by side against another, and none of the rows measure speed, reliability, or how any of this feels after a week. They are capability claims read out of public documentation, which is the most that can be checked from outside.