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Warp Alternative: Bring Your Own Agent
Warp is an agentic development environment, born out of the terminal, for macOS, Linux and Windows. Since April 2026 its core is open source, and it ships a built-in editor, WARP.md project rules, its own agent, and cloud agents that run in containers off your machine.
Warp is a fast, polished terminal, but its agent is built in and billed on AI credits, and if that metering, or the cross-platform generalism, is why you're looking elsewhere, Forkbench takes the opposite approach. It's a Mac app for running your coding agents that stays out of your agent choice entirely: run Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, or Aider on the subscriptions you already pay for, with no per-request credits to watch.
| Forkbench | Warp | |
|---|---|---|
| Why people leave | Paying for AI twice, or wanting their own agent | Happy with one vendor for terminal and agent |
| What the switch costs you | Nothing in your shell. Dotfiles, aliases and tmux carry over untouched | n/a |
| What you give up | Linux and Windows, an open core, and a good built-in agent | n/a |
| AI billing after switching | None from us. You keep paying whoever you already pay | Metered credits |
| Account needed to use it | No account to download and run the terminal | Yes |
| What you gain | A board that outlives the session, Vault (Pro), end-to-end encrypted notes agents read | n/a |
| Price | Free; Pro €30/mo; Team $30/seat, dropping to $20 at scale, flat | Free tier, then metered |
| Credentials an agent can use but never read | Vault (Pro) holds it, and it goes to the one command that needs it, so it never reaches the prompt, the command line or the transcript. A seatbelt, not a guarantee: an agent you authorise for a command could still print what it was handed. | Not a terminal feature. A key in your shell or in a .env is readable by anything you run, agents included. |
Where Warp is strong
- If you leave, you give up one terminal across macOS, Linux and Windows. We only run on the Mac.
- You also give up a genuinely good first-party agent. If you actually use it, replacing it with a CLI agent is a sideways move, not an upgrade.
- And you give up an open core (AGPL) and a large community, for something closed.
Where Forkbench differs
- Keys move out of the environment. 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 paying for AI twice. If you already subscribe to Claude Code or Codex, that subscription does the work and we meter nothing.
- Your shell comes with you. Aliases, prompt, tmux and dotfiles are the shell's, not the terminal's, so there is nothing to port.
- The work stops living in one session. A board per Thread survives the pane closing, the app quitting and the Mac rebooting.
The bottom line
The honest test is whether you use Warp's own agent. If you do, leaving means giving up something good and replacing it with something roughly equivalent, and the credits are simply what that costs. If you don't, because you already pay for Claude Code or Codex, then you are buying an agent twice and metering the one you actually use less. That is the case where switching is clearly worth it, and since your shell config comes with you, trying it costs an evening at most.
Keep reading
Comparison based on publicly available information as of mid-2026. Spot something out of date? Tell us.