CrystalvsSymphony
Generated from the two spec rows. Green marks the better value where a spec has a clear direction. Everything else is just different.
Crystal
Stravu · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
4.62 spec wins
- Reliability
- 4.3
- Usefulness
- 5.0
- Cost
- 6.5
- Longevity
- 2.5
“Still installable with one Homebrew command, which is the most alive thing about it.”
Symphony
OpenAI · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
4.82 spec wins
- Reliability
- 4.7
- Usefulness
- 4.8
- Cost
- 5.5
- Longevity
- 4.0
“The release binary is symphony-v0.0.1, so the version number doubles as the maintenance plan.”
Spec by spec
| Spec | Crystal | Symphony |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| Category | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Runs | local | local |
| Platforms | macos, windows | 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 | No |
| Git operations | YesEach session gets its own git worktree, and Crystal performs rebase and squash-to-main operations from the app. | Yes |
| Browser control | No | No |
| Sandboxed execution | No | No |
| Multi-agent orchestration | Yes | Yes |
| Headless / CI mode | No | Yes |
| Models | ||
| Backbone | via managed agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) | Codex (OpenAI) |
| Bring your own model | No | No |
| Local models | No | No |
| Cost | ||
| Pricing model | free | free |
| Starts at | $0/mo | $0/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Bring your own key | Yes | No |
| Openness | ||
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| GitHub stars | 3,123 | 27,502 |
Which one would each critic pick
| Critic | Crystal | Symphony | Pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Juez | — | — | not enough reviews |
| El Amigo | 4.5 | 4.8 | Symphony — Do not adopt the binary; read the spec. Symphony turns a Linear board into a Codex dispatch loop, and OpenAI says it will not maintain it; pick Gas Town for a loop you can keep. |
| El Crítico | 4.3 | 3.5 | Crystal — A deprecated desktop application still performs rebase and squash-to-main from a button, and nobody is shipping fixes for either the git path or the runtime under it. |
| El Profesor | 5.3 | 5.5 | Symphony — WORKFLOW.md is YAML front matter over a Markdown prompt; a workspace per issue, max_concurrent_agents defaulting to 10 and max_turns to 20, restarts on stall, PRs with proof of work. |
| La Inversora | 4.0 | 4.5 | Symphony — OpenAI wrote an Apache-2.0 spec in April 2026 to sell Codex sessions by the boardful and disclaimed maintenance on day one; 27,000 stars of free distribution. |
| La Jefa | 3.8 | 4.3 | Symphony — Elixir and OTP through mise, Codex and git on the host, tracker credentials for Linear, GitHub Issues, Jira, Asana or GitLab, and nobody on call; not yet. |
| El Hacker | 5.8 | 6.0 | Symphony — Apache-2.0 Elixir, one codex.command key to swap the agent, hooks.after_create to prepare a workspace, no MCP, no local models, and a README that tells me to fork it. |
Picks are derived from each critic's own scores. Humans vote on matchups on the duels page.