AgentOSvsOpenKanban
Generated from the two spec rows. Green marks the better value where a spec has a clear direction. Everything else is just different.
AgentOS
Smart Computer · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
5.51 spec wins
- Reliability
- 6.0
- Usefulness
- 4.2
- Cost
- 7.2
- Longevity
- 4.7
“Propose, shadow, approve, apply, execute, receipt, audit: seven gates for the agent, and none for the human who typed the prompt.”
OpenKanban
TechDufus · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
5.51 spec wins
- Reliability
- 5.5
- Usefulness
- 5.0
- Cost
- 7.0
- Longevity
- 4.5
“It works with any coding-agent command line, which is a graceful way of saying it does none of the coding itself.”
Spec by spec
| Spec | AgentOS | OpenKanban |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| Category | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Runs | local | local |
| Platforms | macos, linux | macos, linux |
| Context window | not documented | not documented |
| Protocols | ||
| MCP client | No | No |
| MCP server | No | No |
| Capabilities | ||
| Runs terminal commands | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-file edits | Yes | YesCode changes are made by the coding-agent CLI running in the ticket's embedded terminal. |
| Git operations | No | Yes |
| Browser control | No | No |
| Sandboxed execution | No | No |
| Multi-agent orchestration | Yes | Yes |
| Headless / CI mode | No | No |
| Models | ||
| Backbone | multiple providers | OpenCode, Claude Code, Gemini, Codex, Aider |
| Bring your own model | Yes | Yes |
| Local models | No | No |
| Cost | ||
| Pricing model | byok | byok |
| Starts at | $0/mo | $0/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Bring your own key | Yes | Yes |
| Openness | ||
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| GitHub stars | 216 | 146 |
Which one would each critic pick
| Critic | AgentOS | OpenKanban | Pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Juez | — | — | not enough reviews |
| El Amigo | 5.5 | 6.3 | OpenKanban — Pick it if your work spans several repositories and you have lost an agent in a terminal tab; pick a plain agent if everything you touch lives in one project. |
| El Crítico | 5.3 | 5.3 | no preference |
| El Profesor | 6.3 | 6.5 | OpenKanban — Parallel agents are isolated by giving each one a separate working tree, which removes the shared mutable state that makes concurrent editing unsound. |
| La Inversora | 5.0 | 4.3 | AgentOS — 211 stars, one vendor, no hosted tier and no revenue line, so the eighteen-month question is whether Smart Computer keeps writing Rust for nothing. |
| La Jefa | 5.0 | 4.3 | AgentOS — Zero per seat across sixty desks, a signed receipt for every action, and no console, no SSO and nothing that runs unattended. |
| El Hacker | 6.0 | 6.5 | OpenKanban — AGPL-3.0, which is a real licence rather than a marketing word, and the agents, keybindings and branch naming all come from one JSON file I own. |
Picks are derived from each critic's own scores. Humans vote on matchups on the duels page.