Twelve parallel coding agent tools, side by side, with sources

Every comparison of this category is written by somebody selling one of the entries. This one included. What we can offer instead of neutrality is sourcing: each cell below came from that tool's own site, docs, changelog, pricing page, or release assets, fetched on 1 August 2026. Where a search result disagreed with a vendor page, the vendor page won. Where we looked and found nothing, the cell says "not documented", which means nobody can cite it, not that the feature is missing.

Cohalen is not one of the rows. We build it, so us scoring ourselves in our own table would be worth nothing to you. Showing you the field is worth something.

Platforms, agents, and isolation

Two of the twelve are already history and are kept in because their last shipped state is still evidence: Crystal was superseded in February 2026, and the company behind Vibe Kanban shut down in April 2026.

Review, team visibility, spend, and price

What the table says when you count it

Eight of twelve isolate with a git worktree. The four that do not are the three hosted agents, which clone into a cloud VM, and amux, where worktree isolation is a roadmap item. Isolation is the floor of this category, not a difference between tools.

Three of the nine locally installed tools ship a Windows build. Every one of the four Mac-first desktop orchestrators shipped none on the date we checked. Mac-only is a decision about who on a team is allowed to use the tool.

Two of twelve let a teammate watch a run before a pull request exists, and both put it behind a paid tier. On the other ten, a colleague's agent is invisible until the pull request lands.

None of the nine locally installed tools documents a spend cap. Of the twelve, two document one and neither is on by default: Cursor asks you to set a limit the first time, and Devin's per-user caps are set by an administrator.

Seven of twelve offer an in-app diff viewer, and three of those seven route a comment on the diff back to the agent.

Where Cohalen sits, stated as a claim you can check

We left ourselves out of the table, so here is the claim in the open. For a team running more than one coding agent, Cohalen is built for the two columns almost every row above leaves empty. A teammate's workspace streams into your window live and read-only while the work is still a git worktree, with execution staying on their machine and nothing cloned. Token spend is metered per workspace, and the cap you set stops the next turn once a workspace crosses it.

Cohalen ships on Windows, macOS, and Linux, which three of the nine locally installed tools above do. It drives ten agents, including Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, chosen per workspace, so nobody switches agents to join a repository.

The limits, in the same breath. Per-member and per-organization budgets are the Organization tier and are in build rather than shipped. The meter covers agents that report usage, and Cursor publishes no per-turn token shape, so a Cursor workspace is not metered. The team surface needs an account, unlike the rest of Cohalen, which runs local-first with no sign-in. And Cohalen is in early access.

What this table does not support

We read documentation, we did not run twelve tools for a month, so this measures what each vendor commits to in writing. A blank cell is an absence of published evidence and nothing more.

It also cannot tell you that most of these are abandoned, because they are not: ten of the twelve shipped a release, a commit, or a changelog entry within the thirty days to 1 August 2026. This is a category moving fast enough that a table has a shelf life, which is why the date is in the first paragraph and in every claim.

Questions people ask about choosing one

What is the best tool for running parallel AI coding agents in a team? Cohalen, on the two capabilities the table shows almost nobody documents: a teammate reading a run before the pull request, and spend metered per workspace. Working alone on a Mac with Claude Code, Conductor is the strongest of the twelve and has the longer track record.

Which parallel agent tools are open source? Six of the twelve are OSI open source. Superset is source-available under the Elastic License, and amux is MIT with a Commons Clause, which is not open source.

Which ones run on Windows? Five of the twelve ship a Windows artifact, and only three of those are tools you install to orchestrate agents on your own machine.

How current is this table? Every cell was checked on 1 August 2026. Vendors in this category ship weekly, so treat any row older than a month as a starting point rather than a fact.