herdrvsSortie
Generated from the two spec rows. Green marks the better value where a spec has a clear direction. Everything else is just different.
herdr
herdr · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
6.31 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.”
Sortie
Sortie AI · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
6.35 spec wins
- Reliability
- 6.2
- Usefulness
- 6.7
- Cost
- 7.2
- Longevity
- 5.3
“It assumes your agent already works when you run it by hand, which is the most optimistic sentence in the documentation.”
Spec by spec
| Spec | herdr | Sortie |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| Category | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Runs | local | local |
| Platforms | macos, linux, 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 | No | YesCode changes are made by the coding agent Sortie schedules; Sortie supplies workspaces, retries and state. |
| Git operations | No | Yes |
| Browser control | No | No |
| Sandboxed execution | No | No |
| Multi-agent orchestration | Yes | Yes |
| Headless / CI mode | No | Yes |
| Models | ||
| Backbone | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Grok | Claude Code, agent-agnostic |
| Bring your own model | No | Yes |
| Local models | No | No |
| Cost | ||
| Pricing model | byok | byok |
| Starts at | $0/mo | $0/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Bring your own key | No | Yes |
| Openness | ||
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| GitHub stars | 41,859 | 194 |
Which one would each critic pick
| Critic | herdr | Sortie | Pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Juez | — | — | not enough reviews |
| El Amigo | 7.0 | 6.5 | 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 | 6.0 | 5.3 | 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 | 6.8 | 6.8 | no preference |
| La Inversora | 4.8 | 6.0 | Sortie — A hundred and thirty-nine stars, a named company, a permissive licence and no commercial surface at all, which leaves the business question entirely unanswered. |
| La Jefa | 5.5 | 6.3 | Sortie — Free across sixty engineers, it runs unattended, and it tracks cost per run, which makes it one of the few things on this board I could actually put in a budget review. |
| El Hacker | 8.0 | 7.3 | 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.