Clay StudiovsXum
Generated from the two spec rows. Green marks the better value where a spec has a clear direction. Everything else is just different.
Clay Studio
chadbyte · Agent harness
OSSMCP
Panel
6.81 spec wins
- Reliability
- 6.2
- Usefulness
- 6.8
- Cost
- 8.0
- Longevity
- 6.0
“It ships something called a Ralph Loop, which is the most honest name anybody has given an infinite while statement.”
Xum
Coder · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
6.82 spec wins
- Reliability
- 6.3
- Usefulness
- 6.3
- Cost
- 8.3
- Longevity
- 6.2
“It renders mermaid diagrams and LaTeX in your terminal, so the agent can now hand you an architecture you did not ask for, beautifully.”
Spec by spec
| Spec | Clay Studio | Xum |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| Category | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Runs | local | local |
| Platforms | macos, linux, windows, web | macos, linux |
| Context window | not documented | not documented |
| Protocols | ||
| MCP client | Yes | No |
| MCP server | No | No |
| Capabilities | ||
| Runs terminal commands | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-file edits | YesClay browses, edits and diffs files in the workspace, but code changes are produced by the coding-agent runtime it dispatches to. | Yes |
| Git operations | Yes | Yes |
| Browser control | No | No |
| Sandboxed execution | No | No |
| Multi-agent orchestration | Yes | Yes |
| Headless / CI mode | No | No |
| Models | ||
| Backbone | Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, Kimi Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, Qwen Code, Junie CLI, Antigravity CLI, OpenCode, Kiro CLI | Anthropic, OpenAI, Grok, Ollama, OpenRouter |
| Bring your own model | Yes | Yes |
| Local models | No | Yes |
| 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 | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| GitHub stars | 399 | 2,045 |
Which one would each critic pick
| Critic | Clay Studio | Xum | Pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Juez | — | — | not enough reviews |
| El Amigo | 7.0 | 7.3 | Xum — Pick Xum when you run several agents at once and keep losing track of them; pick Conductor if you would rather manage that from a graphical interface. |
| El Crítico | 6.5 | 6.3 | Clay Studio — Permission prompts can be answered by whichever teammate is looking, which means the authority to let an agent act belongs to nobody in particular. |
| El Profesor | 7.0 | 6.8 | Clay Studio — Mates carry identity, instructions, knowledge and memory across sessions, and the whole store is JSONL and Markdown on disk rather than an opaque database. |
| La Inversora | 6.3 | 6.5 | Xum — Renamed from Mux after a trademark objection, published by a company whose actual business is development environments, which makes this a strategic side project. |
| La Jefa | 6.0 | 6.3 | Xum — Free for sixty engineers, and the copyleft licence means my counsel reads it before anyone embeds it, while the remote workspaces fit the development servers we already run. |
| El Hacker | 7.8 | 7.8 | no preference |
Picks are derived from each critic's own scores. Humans vote on matchups on the duels page.