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Conductor Alternative for Coding Agents
Conductor is a macOS app for running parallel Claude Code, Codex and Cursor agents in isolated workspaces, with a view of what each one is doing and a flow for reviewing and merging their changes.
Conductor and Forkbench start from the same observation, that running several agents at once needs somewhere better than six terminal tabs, and they draw the line in different places. Conductor is built around the workspace and the review: see what each agent is doing, then merge what you accept. Forkbench is built around what the work can reach, which is why the differences show up in credentials, in what survives the session, and in which agents you are allowed to run.
| Forkbench | Conductor | |
|---|---|---|
| Why people look | Want agents beyond the supported three, or keys out of reach | Happy with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor |
| Agents supported | Any terminal agent, in a real login shell | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor |
| Platform | Native macOS | Native macOS |
| Isolation | One-click git worktrees, plus a kernel-enforced folder lock per Thread | Isolated workspaces per agent |
| Credentials | Vault (Pro): the command gets the value, the agent gets the result | Your environment, as usual |
| What survives the session | A durable board per Thread, through quit and reboot | The workspace and its branch |
| Git authority | Never merges or rebases on its own | Review and merge is a core flow |
| Price | Free; Pro €30/mo; Team $30/seat, dropping to $20 at scale, flat | See their pricing page |
Where Conductor is strong
- The review and merge flow is the thing Conductor is actually about, and it is more opinionated than ours. We deliberately never merge or rebase for you.
- Isolated workspaces per agent are the same idea as our worktrees, and Conductor puts them further forward in the interface.
- If everything you run is Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, its narrower support list costs you nothing.
Where Forkbench differs
- Keys the agent uses and never holds. A token in Vault is used by the command that needs it, so it stays out of the prompt, the command line and the transcript. This is the actual difference; the rest follows from it.
- Folders the 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 it binds a build script and a dependency's install hook too.
- A pane can be cut off from everything the app holds, so an agent handling something you did not write gets no keys, no notes and no board while its shell keeps working.
- Any agent that runs in a terminal, not a supported list of three. Every pane is a real login shell, so Gemini CLI, Aider, OpenCode, Amp or a script of your own are all just things you run.
- The board and the notes come free, including the plan surviving a quit and a reboot. They are how several agents keep out of each other's way, not the thing being sold.
The bottom line
The question that decides it is not how many agents you run or how the review flow feels. It is whether you have noticed that every one of those parallel agents, in either app, can read the same tokens your shell can. Isolated workspaces separate what agents edit; they do nothing about what agents can read, and a key that has been read cannot be un-read. If that is what you came for, that is the difference and it is the whole difference. If what you like is the review-and-merge flow, be aware we deliberately do less there: Forkbench shows the diff and stages hunks, and never merges or rebases on its own. Both run on a Mac and both are free to try.
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Comparison based on publicly available information as of mid-2026. Spot something out of date? Tell us.