Parallel coding agent tools compared

Conductor, Claude Squad, Vibe Kanban and Container Use all start several coding agents at once and keep each one in its own branch. Pick one by where you want to work, in a Mac app, a terminal, a board or containers. gitta works next to any of them and checks how the agents' changes fit together.

Niklas Femerstrand, founder · 21 Oct 2026 · Updated 22 Oct 2026

The short answer

If you want a desktop app with cloud sandboxes and review built in, look at Conductor. If you work in the terminal and want a small open source tool, look at Claude Squad. If you plan work as cards on a board, Vibe Kanban fits. It is now a community project. If you want each agent in a container instead of a folder, look at Container Use. CCManager is a small terminal app like Claude Squad that needs no tmux, and cmux is a Mac terminal that tells you which agent needs you. Claude Code, Cursor and Codex can also make worktrees on their own, so for two or three agents you may not need a separate tool.

All of them answer one question. How do I run many agents without them editing the same files? None of the docs we read describes a check of one agent's change against another agent's code before the merge. gitta answers that second question, and it reads the worktrees these tools make.

The tools at a glance

Facts come from each project's own site, docs and GitHub page, as linked below, in October 2026.

Conductor

Conductor comes from Melty Labs. It runs the first-party Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode agents with your own subscriptions and keys (conductor.build). Each task gets a workspace with its own branch, files, terminal and diff. When the work is ready, Conductor helps you review the diff, open a pull request, merge and archive the workspace (Conductor docs).

On your Mac, a workspace is a git worktree, usually under ~/conductor/workspaces/<repo>/<workspace> (Conductor, Git worktrees). Conductor Cloud, on the Pro, Teams and Enterprise plans, runs each workspace in a Vercel sandbox with the repository and dependencies installed (Conductor, Pricing). Workspaces can be shared with teammates, who see who is active and prompt agents together.

Tests run per workspace. An action runs your test command in the workspace folder. Spotlight testing syncs one workspace back to the repository root and tests it there (Conductor, Testing). Several agents can also share one Conductor workspace when they work on the same branch. Its docs say clearly that those agents can then edit the same files (Conductor, Parallel agents).

Claude Squad

Claude Squad is an open source terminal app from smtg-ai. It manages Claude Code, Codex, Gemini and other terminal agents in one window, and you can set the program for new instances with -p, for example Aider. It needs tmux and the GitHub CLI. Each agent gets a tmux session and a git worktree on its own branch (Claude Squad on GitHub).

brew install claude-squad
cs                 # opens the session list
cs -p "codex"      # start new instances with another agent

You can let tasks run in the background, review the changes before you apply them, and check out a branch before you push it. An experimental --autoyes flag accepts agent prompts by itself. Claude Squad is licensed under AGPL-3.0, which matters if you plan to change it and offer it to others.

Vibe Kanban

Vibe Kanban puts agent work on a kanban board. You plan issues as cards and start a workspace for an issue when you are ready. Each workspace gives an agent a branch, a terminal and a dev server. You review diffs with inline comments that go straight to the agent, preview the app in a built-in browser and open pull requests. It supports more than ten agents, including Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Amp, Cursor and OpenCode (Vibe Kanban on GitHub).

Bloop, the company behind it, shut down on 10 April 2026. The project continues as open source, maintained by its community. Its remote services, including shared kanban issues, comments, projects and organisations, closed 30 days later. Local workspaces keep working (Goodbye bloop).

Container Use

Container Use, from Dagger, is an MCP server that gives each agent a fresh container in its own git branch. You see the command history and logs of each agent, can open any agent's terminal, and review its work with git checkout <branch>. It works with Claude Code, Cursor and other agents that speak MCP. The project describes itself as early in development (Container Use on GitHub).

brew install dagger/tap/container-use
claude mcp add container-use -- container-use stdio

Containers isolate more than worktrees do. Each agent gets its own files, and also its own installed packages and processes.

CCManager

CCManager, from kbwo, is a terminal app that runs several agent sessions side by side across git worktrees and projects. It supports Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex CLI, Cursor Agent, Copilot CLI, Cline CLI, OpenCode and Kimi CLI. It needs no tmux. The menu shows whether each session is busy, waiting for you or idle, and you can create, merge and delete worktrees from inside the app. A .worktreeinclude file carries ignored files such as .env into each new worktree. Status change hooks can send you a notification, and an experimental auto approval mode lets an AI model accept prompts it finds safe. CCManager is MIT licensed (CCManager on GitHub).

npm install -g ccmanager
ccmanager          # or npx ccmanager

cmux

cmux, from Manaflow, is a macOS terminal built on Ghostty for people who run many agents at once. Vertical tabs show the git branch, the linked pull request, the working folder and the latest notification of each workspace. When an agent waits for you, its pane gets a blue ring and its tab lights up. It runs any agent that runs in a terminal, such as Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI and Aider. cmux claude-teams shows Claude Code teammates as split panes, and a browser pane lets an agent use your dev server. cmux does not make worktrees for you, so you point each workspace at a worktree or clone yourself. The app is open source under GPL-3.0 or later (cmux on GitHub).

brew tap manaflow-ai/cmux
brew install --cask cmux

Built into the agents

You may not need a separate tool at all. claude --worktree name starts a Claude Code session in a new worktree under .claude/worktrees/, and subagents can use isolation: worktree (Anthropic, Run parallel sessions with worktrees). Cursor makes worktrees for agents with /worktree and /best-of-n. The Codex app can start each chat in a worktree. With plain Git it is one command per agent.

git worktree add -b fix-login ../app-fix-login main
cd ../app-fix-login && claude

What none of them checks

Every tool above keeps agents apart while they work. Each one then shows you one agent's diff and one agent's tests at a time. Git and your CI merge the work of two agents later, after the agents are done.

How often does this cause problems? We replayed 733 pairs of AI agent pull requests that were open at the same time in public GitHub projects, from the AIDev dataset that Xu et al. studied (arXiv 2607.04697). Git reported a textual conflict in 179 pairs, 24.4%. For pairs where two different agents made the pull requests, it was 43.3%.

We could test some of the clean merges end to end. Of those, one pair in firecrawl-mcp-server merged cleanly and then failed to build. Both pull requests had added the same maxAge key to one object, a hundred lines apart. Each one passed its own tests. Any of these tools would have shown both pull requests as green, because each one was.

What gitta adds to each of them

gitta reads git worktree list, so it finds the worktrees Conductor, Claude Squad, CCManager, Claude Code, Cursor and Codex make, and any you make by hand. It needs no setup per tool.

• Warnings across worktrees. When one agent changes a function, type, constant or field that another agent's new code uses, the second agent hears about it at its next step. Claude Code gets the warning through hooks, whichever tool started it. Cursor and Codex get it through MCP tools.
• Tests on the combined work. When you ask, gitta runs your own test command, the gate, on two agents' work together. gitta check reports PASSES, BREAKS or DOES_NOT_MERGE.
• A check inside your normal git merge. On git merge, git pull or git push to main, gitta runs your tests on the combined code. It stops the merge when they fail. Removed tests and weakened security controls are reported in the merge output and the log.
• A check on pull requests. Agents that only open pull requests, such as Devin, Jules or Copilot, get the same comparison in CI. On firecrawl, the check reported the break with the TypeScript error.
• An audit trail. Every warning, check and merge is recorded, and gitta audit exports it as CSV or JSON.

gitta uses no AI model. It parses the code with Tree-sitter, reads COBOL and JCL with its own reader in gitta Enterprise, and runs your tests. It runs on your own machines, and with gitta Enterprise the team server runs in your own cloud account. See Security and data.

Set it up next to your tool

1. Keep the tool you use to start agents.
2. Run gitta init --gate "your test command" once in the main checkout.
3. Start agents as usual. gitta picks up each new worktree by itself.
4. Watch them live with gitta watch in a terminal, or follow .gitta/gitta.log with tail -f.
5. Merge with git as usual. gitta checks the combined code during the merge.

For Cursor and Codex, add a line to AGENTS.md that tells the agent to call gitta_status before it finishes, because an MCP tool runs only when the agent calls it. See Quick start and Agents.