AgentaravsCodeMachine
Generated from the two spec rows. Green marks the better value where a spec has a clear direction. Everything else is just different.
Agentara
MagicCube · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
5.80 spec wins
- Reliability
- 5.2
- Usefulness
- 5.5
- Cost
- 7.7
- Longevity
- 4.8
“It schedules your agent with cron patterns, which is how a side project quietly becomes a pager rotation of one.”
CodeMachine
CodeMachine · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
5.83 spec wins
- Reliability
- 5.3
- Usefulness
- 6.3
- Cost
- 6.0
- Longevity
- 5.3
“Its selling point is doing the thinking you were already supposed to be holding in your head.”
Spec by spec
| Spec | Agentara | CodeMachine |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| Category | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Runs | local | local |
| Platforms | macos, linux | macos, linux, windows |
| Context window | not documented | not documented |
| Protocols | ||
| MCP client | No | No |
| MCP server | No | No |
| Capabilities | ||
| Runs terminal commands | YesAgentara launches the Claude Code and Codex CLIs as managed sessions; it does not expose a shell tool of its own. | Yes |
| Multi-file edits | YesFiles are changed by the Claude Code or Codex session Agentara runs in the configured workspace, not by Agentara itself. | Yes |
| Git operations | No | No |
| Browser control | No | No |
| Sandboxed execution | No | No |
| Multi-agent orchestration | No | Yes |
| Headless / CI mode | No | YesIt drives the headless scripting mode that Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other engines expose, rather than running unattended itself. |
| Models | ||
| Backbone | Claude Code, OpenAI Codex | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor |
| 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 | unspecified | Apache-2.0 |
| GitHub stars | 515 | 2,512 |
Which one would each critic pick
| Critic | Agentara | CodeMachine | Pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Juez | — | — | not enough reviews |
| El Amigo | 6.3 | 6.0 | Agentara — Pick Agentara if you want an agent that keeps working after you close the laptop; pick a plain Claude Code session if you are at the keyboard anyway. |
| El Crítico | 5.5 | 5.3 | Agentara — Queued tasks are dispatched serially per session and nothing documented detects a session that has stopped making progress, so one wedged run stalls its queue. |
| El Profesor | 6.3 | 6.0 | Agentara — Sessions persist as JSONL carrying the full message history, which makes a run reconstructible after the fact; the reasoning loop belongs to the delegated CLI. |
| La Inversora | 5.5 | 5.0 | Agentara — An MIT badge in the README with no LICENSE file in the repository is not a licence, and 504 stars around a single maintainer is not a company. |
| La Jefa | 4.8 | 4.8 | no preference |
| El Hacker | 6.5 | 7.5 | CodeMachine — Apache-2.0, one global npm install, and the workflow is a file I own rather than a hosted definition, which is the whole reason to use a layer like this. |
Picks are derived from each critic's own scores. Humans vote on matchups on the duels page.