OpenKanbanvsharness
Generated from the two spec rows. Green marks the better value where a spec has a clear direction. Everything else is just different.
OpenKanban
TechDufus · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
5.52 spec wins
- Reliability
- 5.5
- Usefulness
- 5.0
- Cost
- 7.0
- Longevity
- 4.5
“It works with any coding-agent command line, which is a graceful way of saying it does none of the coding itself.”
harness
wedow · Agent harness
OSS
Panel
5.62 spec wins
- Reliability
- 5.0
- Usefulness
- 5.5
- Cost
- 7.3
- Longevity
- 4.7
“It can sign in with your ChatGPT or Claude subscription, which is a large decision for a hundred lines of shell script to be making.”
Spec by spec
| Spec | OpenKanban | harness |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| Category | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Runs | local | local |
| Platforms | macos, linux | 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 | YesCode changes are made by the coding-agent CLI running in the ticket's embedded terminal. | Yes |
| Git operations | Yes | No |
| Browser control | No | No |
| Sandboxed execution | No | No |
| Multi-agent orchestration | Yes | No |
| Headless / CI mode | No | Yes |
| Models | ||
| Backbone | OpenCode, Claude Code, Gemini, Codex, Aider | Anthropic, OpenAI, Groq, ChatGPT subscription, Claude subscription |
| Bring your own model | Yes | Yes |
| Local models | No | No |
| Cost | ||
| Pricing model | byok | byok |
| Starts at | $0/mo | $0/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Bring your own key | Yes | Yes |
| Openness | ||
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| GitHub stars | 146 | 169 |
Which one would each critic pick
| Critic | OpenKanban | harness | Pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Juez | — | — | not enough reviews |
| El Amigo | 6.3 | 6.0 | OpenKanban — Pick it if your work spans several repositories and you have lost an agent in a terminal tab; pick a plain agent if everything you touch lives in one project. |
| El Crítico | 5.3 | 4.5 | OpenKanban — Every ticket creates a branch and a checkout, and removal is described as configurable behaviour, which means accumulation is the default outcome. |
| El Profesor | 6.5 | 6.3 | OpenKanban — Parallel agents are isolated by giving each one a separate working tree, which removes the shared mutable state that makes concurrent editing unsound. |
| La Inversora | 4.3 | 5.5 | harness — A hundred and sixty-seven stars against more than a thousand forum mentions in a year: this is the most-discussed and least-installed row I have read today. |
| La Jefa | 4.3 | 4.3 | no preference |
| El Hacker | 6.5 | 7.3 | harness — MIT, Homebrew or the AUR, and the entire dependency list is bash, jq and curl, with plugins in whatever language I feel like writing them in. |
Picks are derived from each critic's own scores. Humans vote on matchups on the duels page.