Same worktrees. Any machine, and the whole team.
Conductor runs parallel Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode agents in git worktrees on your Mac, with a diff and a merge button. Cordane does the worktree-per-task part too — on any machine you own, driven from a kanban board your team shares, reached from a browser or a phone, with nothing inbound.
Conductor is a Mac app; Cordane is a hub. The line is drawn below.A ticket becomes a worktree, a branch and an agent.
The part Conductor and Cordane share, on camera — except the machine it runs on is not the laptop it is watched from. A real run, nothing staged; the plan comes back to the card.
Both isolate every task in a worktree. They differ in where it runs and who sees it.
Conductor's line is "Run parallel coding agents on your Mac." Cordane agrees about the worktrees and the parallelism. The difference is the last three words, and what a team does with the result.
Parallel agents on your Mac.
- A native macOS app. Each task gets its own workspace — a git worktree, branch, terminal, diff and review path — and "agents and commands still run on your Mac with your user permissions".
- Setup and run scripts per workspace, a
CONDUCTOR_PORTper app, then review the diff, open a pull request, merge and archive — all inside the app. - Free for local workspaces. Pro ($50/month) adds Conductor Cloud workspace hours and multiplayer for up to five; Teams is $60 per user. A self-hosted cloud is "under development".
Parallel agents on any machine you own.
- A worker on a Linux VPS, a GPU box, an office desktop or your laptop dials out to a hub you self-host. The agent runs there, not on the machine you happen to be holding.
- A ticket starts the work: worktree, branch, setup hook, a block of ports, plan then implement, and the diff and how far behind main it is, on the card.
- The UI is a browser tab the whole team opens — with a phone layout — and a dev server gets a stable link, team-only or public, for people who have nothing installed.
- Free forever to self-host on the Community tier, and your code never runs on our servers — managed cloud hosts only the hub. The hub isn't open source; the deploy config is MIT.
Join the machine, drop the ticket, review from wherever you are.
The loop is the one you already know from Conductor. The difference is that step one can be a machine three time zones away, and step three can be a colleague on a phone.
Join a worker
One command on the box that should do the work — the laptop, or the 32-core machine under the desk. It connects outward to your hub, so nothing is opened on it and it joins from behind NAT or an office firewall the same as from a datacenter.
Drop a ticket on the board
Start work and Cordane cuts a git worktree on a fresh branch from main, runs your setup hooks, reserves a block of ports and hands the ticket to Claude Code, Codex, opencode or pi — a plan phase, then an implement phase. Give it a start time, or let the autonomous column pick it up.
Review from anywhere
The card shows the agent's state, the diff and how far behind main the branch is. Click through to the dev server it started, on its own subdomain — or send that link to someone who has never installed anything. Cordane has already pushed the branch and opened the PR (when the worker has gh); merge it on GitHub the way you always have.
Where the code runs. On your workers, always. Cordane's managed cloud hosts the hub — the board, the accounts, the proxy — and nothing else; there are no cloud workspaces to buy hours of. If you want an agent on a bigger machine, you join a bigger machine.
Which Conductor jobs Cordane covers — and which it doesn't.
Conductor's site and docs describe what it is for. Here is the same list with Cordane's answer next to each line, including the ones where the answer is no.
| The job | Cordane |
|---|---|
| Parallel agents, each in its own git worktree on its own branch | Covered — one worktree per ticket; a multi-repo project branches every repo at once. |
| Setup and run scripts per workspace, with ports that don't collide | Covered — setup hooks run before the agent; every ticket reserves its own block of ports. |
| Agents on a machine that isn't your Mac — a Linux VPS, a GPU box, an office desktop | Covered — this is the whole point. Workers run on Linux and macOS and dial out; nothing inbound. |
| The whole team on one board, from a browser or a phone | Covered — it's a web app with a real phone layout; teams, projects and private workers on the free tier. |
| Clicking through the running dev server, and sharing it with someone outside | Covered — a stable subdomain per app, team-only by default, public with one toggle; opens on a phone with no login. |
| Reviewing the diff, then opening the pull request and merging | Partly — the diff and the behind-main count are on the card, and after an implement pass Cordane pushes the branch and opens the PR with the worker's gh CLI. The merge happens on GitHub, not from a button here. |
| Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode | Partly — ticket-driven runs speak Claude Code, Codex, opencode and pi; any CLI runs in a terminal, but there is no Cursor adapter. |
| A native Mac app | Not covered — Cordane is a browser tab, on purpose. There is no desktop app and no menu-bar icon. |
| Cloud workspaces you buy hours of | Not covered — your code never runs on Cordane's servers. Managed cloud hosts the hub; the machines are yours. |
What changes when the agent isn't on your laptop.
A desktop app is bounded by the desk. Once the worktree lives on a machine that stays on, three things that were awkward become ordinary.
Close the lid
The run keeps going on the worker when your laptop sleeps, and the space comes back exactly where it was when you reopen it — on the laptop, or on a phone on the train.
Work that starts without you
Give a ticket a start time in your own timezone, or drop it in the autonomous column. The worker picks it up at 07:00; the result is on the card when you sit down.
A team without seat maths
Everyone on the project sees the same board and the same agent states; a teammate can sit in your terminal by name. Two users, a worker and every feature are on the free tier.
Before you pick one — or both.
Is Cordane a Conductor alternative?
Do I need a Mac?
Does Cordane open the pull request and merge it?
Which agents does Cordane run?
Where does my code actually run?
Can I use both?
Run the worktrees on a box that stays on.
Self-hosting is free and available now — start with the quickstart, no email required. Want us to run the hub? Managed cloud starts with a 14-day free trial from the pricing page; your workers stay on your machines.
Community tier: free forever, no license key, no account with us.