KortixvsBackground Agents (Open-Inspect)
Generated from the two spec rows. Green marks the better value where a spec has a clear direction. Everything else is just different.
Kortix
Kortix · Autonomous SWE
#156OSSMCP
Panel
6.42 spec wins
- Reliability
- 6.3
- Usefulness
- 6.7
- Cost
- 6.2
- Longevity
- 6.5
“Suna grew up, changed its name to Kortix, and now files change requests like the rest of us.”
Background Agents (Open-Inspect)
Cole Murray · Autonomous SWE
#126OSS
Panel
6.42 spec wins
- Reliability
- 6.0
- Usefulness
- 7.0
- Cost
- 6.7
- Longevity
- 6.0
“It supports multiplayer sessions, so several people can now watch the same agent make the same decision in real time.”
Spec by spec
| Spec | Kortix | Background Agents (Open-Inspect) |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| Category | Autonomous SWE | Autonomous SWE |
| Runs | cloud, sandbox | sandbox, cloud |
| Platforms | macos, linux, web | linux, web |
| Context window | not documented | not documented |
| Protocols | ||
| MCP client | Yes | No |
| MCP server | No | No |
| Capabilities | ||
| Runs terminal commands | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-file edits | Yes | Yes |
| Git operations | Yes | Yes |
| Browser control | Yes | Yes |
| Sandboxed execution | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-agent orchestration | Yes | Yes |
| Headless / CI mode | No | Yes |
| Models | ||
| Backbone | any | Anthropic Claude, OpenAI Codex, xAI Grok, OpenCode Zen |
| Bring your own model | Yes | Yes |
| Local models | No | No |
| Cost | ||
| Pricing model | mixed | byok |
| Starts at | $40/mo | $0/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Bring your own key | Yes | Yes |
| Openness | ||
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| GitHub stars | 20,240 | 3,303 |
Which one would each critic pick
| Critic | Kortix | Background Agents (Open-Inspect) | Pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Juez | — | — | not enough reviews |
| El Amigo | 6.3 | 6.8 | Background Agents (Open-Inspect) — Pick Open-Inspect if your backlog is full of well-specified tickets; pick an interactive agent if the work needs a conversation before anyone knows what to build. |
| El Crítico | 5.5 | 6.0 | Background Agents (Open-Inspect) — It is documented as designed for single-tenant deployment inside one trusted organisation, and it can also be started by inbound webhooks and third-party alerts. |
| El Profesor | 6.5 | 7.0 | Background Agents (Open-Inspect) — Pull requests carry commit attribution back to the person who prompted the run, which preserves provenance through the artefact rather than only in a log. |
| La Inversora | 7.0 | 6.3 | Kortix — Twenty thousand stars and a free tier metered at 200 sandbox credits, with enterprise terms behind a conversation, is open-source distribution converted into a compute margin. |
| La Jefa | 5.5 | 5.3 | Kortix — Team seats run $40 each, so sixty is $2,400 a month before consumption, and the code sits on vendor machines unless we take on running it ourselves. |
| El Hacker | 7.8 | 7.3 | Kortix — Apache-2.0, an MCP client, and a curl install for a thing I can also self-host, which is most of what I ask, minus any local model path. |
Picks are derived from each critic's own scores. Humans vote on matchups on the duels page.