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Claude Squad Alternative With a Board and a Vault
Claude Squad is an open-source terminal program (tmux + git worktrees) for running multiple coding agents side by side.
Claude Squad is a well-liked free TUI for running agents in tmux with worktrees, and it stays out of your way right up until you need more than a session list: no shared backlog, no view of who's blocked, no secrets handling. Forkbench targets the same job, many agents, one human in control, as a fuller macOS surface: a visual board for the whole fleet, a vault agents use and never read, and a task board agents can actually claim and hand off from.
| Forkbench | Claude Squad | |
|---|---|---|
| Why people leave | Outgrew a session list | Wants free, open, all-terminal |
| What the switch costs you | Nothing in your shell. tmux still runs inside a tab | n/a |
| What you give up | Free, open source, and a pure CLI workflow | n/a |
| Telling who is stuck | One board, at a glance | Tab through the panes |
| Work that survives the session | Board persists through quit and reboot | Session list only |
| Secrets | Vault (Pro), sealed on your Mac | Shell environment |
| Reaching an agent from elsewhere | Web and phone (Pro) | No |
| Price | Free; Pro €30/mo | Free, open source |
Where Claude Squad is strong
- Free and open source (AGPL); inspectable and scriptable.
- Pure terminal / tmux workflow, great if you never want to leave the CLI.
- Agent-agnostic: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Aider.
Where Forkbench differs
- Keys move out of the shell and into Vault (Pro). An agent runs the command that needs a token without the token entering its context.
- Folders the macOS kernel enforces. A Thread can be locked to the folders the job is about, applied as each shell starts and inherited by every process it spawns, so an agent cannot read or write outside them. Builds still run and the network is untouched.
- You stop tabbing through panes to find the one that stopped. One board shows who holds what, and what is waiting on you.
- Work stops dying with the session, sealed the same way the Vault is. The plan, the progress notes and the blockers survive a closed pane, a quit, and a reboot.
- tmux still works. It runs inside a tab exactly as it does now, so this is additive rather than a replacement.
The bottom line
Claude Squad is free, open source, and good at what it does, so the question is not which one is better. It is whether you have outgrown a session list. If you can still tell at a glance which of your agents is stuck, you haven't, and you should keep it. The moment you can't, what you need is a board rather than more panes, and that is the only reason this page exists.
Keep reading
Comparison based on publicly available information as of mid-2026. Spot something out of date? Tell us.