Conductorvsherdr
Generated from the two spec rows. Green marks the better value where a spec has a clear direction. Everything else is just different.
Conductor
Conductor · Agent harness
Panel
5.83 spec wins
- Reliability
- 6.0
- Usefulness
- 6.0
- Cost
- 5.5
- Longevity
- 5.8
“Pro lets you collaborate with up to five other Pro users, which is how you know the company had five people.”
herdr
herdr · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
6.32 spec wins
- Reliability
- 6.2
- Usefulness
- 5.7
- Cost
- 7.5
- Longevity
- 6.0
“A tmux for agents whose detach key is ctrl+b q, so twenty years of muscle memory finally counts as onboarding.”
Spec by spec
| Spec | Conductor | herdr |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| Category | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Runs | local, cloud | local |
| Platforms | macos | macos, linux, windows |
| Context window | not documented | not documented |
| Protocols | ||
| MCP client | No | No |
| MCP server | No | No |
| Capabilities | ||
| Runs terminal commands | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-file edits | No | No |
| Git operations | Yes | No |
| Browser control | No | No |
| Sandboxed execution | No | No |
| Multi-agent orchestration | Yes | Yes |
| Headless / CI mode | Yes | No |
| Models | ||
| Backbone | via managed agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode) | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Grok |
| Bring your own model | No | No |
| Local models | No | No |
| Cost | ||
| Pricing model | mixed | byok |
| Starts at | $50/mo | $0/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Bring your own key | Yes | No |
| Openness | ||
| Open source | No | Yes |
| License | proprietary | Apache-2.0 |
| GitHub stars | n/a | 41,859 |
Which one would each critic pick
| Critic | Conductor | herdr | Pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Juez | — | — | not enough reviews |
| El Amigo | 6.8 | 7.0 | herdr — Pick herdr if your Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or OpenCode sessions die when you close the laptop; pick Claude Squad if what you actually need is a worktree per task. |
| El Crítico | 5.8 | 6.0 | herdr — Agents can spawn panes and prompt other agents on one host with no sandbox and no worktrees, so a chain of agents shares one working tree and one set of permissions. |
| El Profesor | 6.3 | 6.8 | herdr — One Rust binary with a socket API, per-pane status tracking, and a wait primitive that returns only when another agent is genuinely blocked; no benchmark, and nothing to benchmark. |
| La Inversora | 6.8 | 4.8 | Conductor — YC-backed, Pro at $50 a month for a Mac app over other people's agents, and a hosting bill it currently eats; the acquirer is whoever runs the sandboxes. |
| La Jefa | 5.8 | 5.5 | Conductor — Teams is invite-only, SAML and SCIM sit in a custom-priced Enterprise tier, it is Mac-only, and CI reaches it only through a beta API on the paid tier; not yet. |
| El Hacker | 3.8 | 8.0 | herdr — Apache-2.0, one binary via brew or mise, a socket API I can script from anything, no MCP and no model settings because it owns terminals, not agents. |
Picks are derived from each critic's own scores. Humans vote on matchups on the duels page.