cmuxvsContainer Use
Generated from the two spec rows. Green marks the better value where a spec has a clear direction. Everything else is just different.
cmux
Manaflow · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
6.62 spec wins
- Reliability
- 6.3
- Usefulness
- 6.5
- Cost
- 7.5
- Longevity
- 6.0
“A terminal for coordinating many agents on exactly one operating system, so the agent wars are settled by what laptop you were issued.”
Container Use
Dagger · Agent harness
OSSMCP
Panel
7.06 spec wins
- Reliability
- 6.7
- Usefulness
- 7.2
- Cost
- 8.0
- Longevity
- 6.3
“Eighteen agent integrations are documented, which is eighteen programs that were otherwise going to run commands on your laptop.”
Spec by spec
| Spec | cmux | Container Use |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| Category | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Runs | local | sandbox |
| Platforms | macos | macos, linux |
| Context window | not documented | not documented |
| Protocols | ||
| MCP client | No | No |
| MCP server | No | Yes |
| Capabilities | ||
| Runs terminal commands | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-file edits | No | Yes |
| Git operations | NoThe sidebar displays branch and pull request status but cmux performs no git operations itself. | Yes |
| Browser control | Yes | No |
| Sandboxed execution | No | YesEach environment is a container built through Dagger, requiring Docker and git on the host. |
| Multi-agent orchestration | YesNative panes for Claude Code Teams and oh-my-opencode orchestration; cmux runs and watches the agents rather than running an agent loop of its own. | Yes |
| Headless / CI mode | No | No |
| Models | ||
| Backbone | via managed agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, Amp, Aider) | any (agent and model agnostic) |
| Bring your own model | No | Yes |
| Local models | No | No |
| Cost | ||
| Pricing model | free | free |
| Starts at | $0/mo | $0/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Bring your own key | No | Yes |
| Openness | ||
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| License | GPL-3.0-or-later | Apache-2.0 |
| GitHub stars | 27,557 | 4,054 |
Which one would each critic pick
| Critic | cmux | Container Use | Pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Juez | — | — | not enough reviews |
| El Amigo | 7.3 | 7.3 | no preference |
| El Crítico | 6.5 | 6.3 | cmux — A programmable browser lives inside the same application that hosts your agents and your remote sessions, and no sandbox is recorded anywhere on the row. |
| El Profesor | 6.8 | 7.8 | Container Use — Every action an agent takes is recorded into git, so verification is a diff and a log rather than a transcript, and accept is deliberately two different verbs. |
| La Inversora | 6.0 | 6.5 | Container Use — Dagger publishes this free under Apache-2.0 because every agent that adopts it becomes a workload on Dagger's engine; the value accrues one layer up. |
| La Jefa | 5.5 | 6.3 | Container Use — Nothing to license for sixty, but a container engine on every developer machine is a fleet decision, and there is no headless mode to put this in a pipeline. |
| El Hacker | 7.5 | 8.3 | Container Use — Apache-2.0, `brew install dagger/tap/container-use`, and one line of MCP config wires it into any agent that speaks the protocol. |
Picks are derived from each critic's own scores. Humans vote on matchups on the duels page.