conductor vs crystl, compared

Both put each agent in its own git worktree so three of them can work one repo without clobbering each other. The two products then answer the next question differently. Conductor says the worktree should be in a sandbox they run. crystl says it should be on a machine you already own. Pick on that, not on the feature grid.

what changed in september

Conductor used to say "run parallel coding agents on your Mac". As of this month its homepage says "run a team of coding agents in the cloud". Their own terms page still shows the old subtitle, which is how you can date the switch.

This is worth knowing before you read any older review. The free Mac app still exists and is still good. But the product is now a hosted, multi-seat platform with a Mac app as the client, and the roadmap is about teams. If you tried Conductor six months ago and liked the local worktree manager, you tried something else.

at a glance

Conductor's paid tiers continue past Pro: Teams at $60 per user per month, currently invite-only, and a custom Enterprise tier with a DPA, SAML SSO and SCIM.

what they agree on

More than you would guess from the marketing. Both run the first-party agent CLIs rather than their own model, so you keep paying Anthropic or OpenAI directly and neither company sits in your token billing. Both give each agent a separate branch and a separate checkout. Both are Mac apps. Both have a free tier that covers the single-player case.

If you have never run two agents on one repo at once, either of these fixes the problem you are about to have. That problem is two agents editing the same working directory, and one of them losing. Git worktrees are the mechanism underneath both, so you can also do this by hand for free.

conductor

Conductor's unit is the workspace: one worktree, one branch, one agent, one terminal, one diff. The sidebar is a flat list of them. That flatness is why the app reads as clean. There is no second level to nest anything under.

Where it is genuinely ahead:

• Review the agent acts on. You click a line in the diff, type what you want changed, and the agent picks it up and iterates. Since 0.84.0 you can also edit files directly inside the diff. Every independent write-up of Conductor singles this out, and it is the thing crystl has no answer to.
• Work that keeps running without your laptop. A cloud workspace is an isolated microVM with 8 vCPUs, 16 GB of RAM and 32 GB of disk, running Amazon Linux 2023 on Vercel's sandbox infrastructure. Close the lid and the agent keeps going until the sandbox sleeps.
• A shared environment you build once. An organization gets one "cloud computer": up to 50 GitHub repositories, org-level environment variables and secrets, and an install script. You press build, and every new workspace starts from that image with dependencies already there. You can hand the configuring to an agent, which is allowed to edit setup scripts and run builds but not to touch secrets, add repositories or manage members.
• Multiplayer. Presence dots, and shared chats where two people watch the same agent output stream. You can follow a colleague's workspace, hand one over with "reassign to", or copy a workspace link with a keystroke.
• The git host integration. The agent opens pull requests, reads diffs and answers review comments. There is a Linear integration and an MCP server.
• SOC 2 Type II, which is the answer some procurement teams need before any of the rest matters.

Two things to hold against it. Cloud compute is free right now and their FAQ says usage-based pricing is planned, so $50 is an introductory number on top of the agent subscription you already pay for. And cloud repositories are GitHub only, in one region, with no other git host supported yet.

Pick Conductor if you work with other people on the same repos, and you want agents running while your laptop is shut. That only works if shipping your code to a vendor's sandbox is allowed where you work, which for plenty of people it is not.

crystl

Disclosures first, because they end it for some people. crystl is macOS only. It is closed source. It is single-player: there is no shared workspace, no presence, no org admin, and nobody else can open your session. It has no hosted compute, so nothing keeps running once your Mac sleeps unless the work is on a server you own. It has no inline diff review, which is Conductor's best feature. And the orchestration half is $170 a year, though isolated shards, approvals, history, SSH and the activity panel are all free.

What crystl does instead is assume the machines are already yours. A gem is a project; a shard is a session inside it. Anisolated shard gets its own worktree and branch. When the gem already has a live SSH session, crystl creates that worktreeon the remote server instead of on your Mac. Same isolation, same branch tracking, same merge on close, on hardware you rent or own directly.

The rest follows from running on your own kit rather than a vendor's:

• It spans projects, not just branches. Conductor's largest unit is a repository. crystl's fan-out crosses gems, so one command answers which of eleven agents across four projects is stuck waiting for a person.
• The write guard. Worktrees are a git convention, not a fence. crystl denies a structured write that lands outside the shard's own worktree, before the tool runs. It resolves symlinks the way the filesystem does rather than by string matching, and it resolves remote paths on the remote side. It is not an OS sandbox though, and thedocs are specific about what a shell command can still do.
• It will not throw work away. A branch with commits, a worktree with uncommitted changes, or a state crystl cannot verify all survive a closed session. They park in a panel with the commit count and the last-commit age, and you reattach, merge or discard them on purpose.
• Your agents can drive it. The CLI is meant to be called by an agent, so one agent can spawn worktree-isolated siblings, read what they are doing and merge them back.
• Models you host. Point crystl at an Ollama, vLLM or OpenAI-shaped endpoint and aim workers at it, alongside the hosted agents rather than instead of them.
• The phone app ships today. Answering an approval from the kitchen works over Wi-Fi on the free tier, and from anywhere on guild. Conductor's iOS app is announced.

Pick crystl if you work alone or nearly alone, you run agents across several projects at once, and you would rather the code stayed on machines you control.

where your code is kept is the actual question

Conductor spells this out on their own pricing page, so we will quote them rather than paraphrase them. Local Conductor sends your messages straight to the model provider and keeps session data on your device, and they say they never see it. Cloud Conductor runs the session on their infrastructure, and their FAQ says plainly that chat messages sent in cloud workspaces are stored on Conductor's servers.

That is a fair trade for what it buys. Snapshot restore, a prebuilt environment, work that continues overnight and two people in one chat are all things that need a shared host. You cannot have them and also have nothing leave your machine.

crystl made the other choice, and the cost is real in the other direction. There is no equivalent of closing your laptop and finding the work done, unless you did the work of pointing a gem at a server first. Nobody can look over your shoulder at a workspace, which is a feature right up until you want a second opinion on a branch.

what conductor does better

Plainly, because it matters more than any grid:

• Diff review. Comment on a line and the agent iterates. crystl shows you diffs; it does not turn your comment into the agent's next instruction.
• Pull requests. One click from a workspace, plus Linear. crystl merges branches locally and leaves the PR to you.
• Teams. Shared chats, presence, reassignment, an admin portal, SOC 2 Type II, SAML and SCIM. crystl has none of that and is not building toward it.
• A prebuilt environment. Their cloud computer builds an image once for the whole org. crystl detects your package manager and runs an install per worktree, which is slower and per-machine.
• Overnight work with no server of your own. Pay $50, get sandboxes. With crystl you need a box, and setting one up is on you.
• The sidebar. Conductor's parallel work is always visible in the rail. crystl's worktree panel shows more per row, including the task, the model and the commit count, but it sits behind a button until you ask for it.

how to choose in one pass

• Your code cannot go to a third party: crystl, or Conductor's free local tier.
• You are on Windows or Linux: neither. Both are Mac apps.
• You want two people in the same agent session: Conductor Pro or Teams.
• You want agents working while you sleep and you have no server: Conductor Pro.
• You already have a server, or a work machine you SSH into: crystl.
• You are juggling agents across four repos, not four branches of one: crystl.
• Reviewing the diff is where you spend your time: Conductor.
• You run one agent at a time: neither. Use the terminal and add tmux.

If you read this and picked Conductor, this page worked. The free tier costs nothing and the app is good, and a comparison that never sends anyone the other way is an advert.

further reading

• The best UI for Claude Code, compared
• tmux vs git worktrees for running multiple agents
• Claude Code alternatives, compared
• The tools that run multiple agents at once
• Git worktrees with Claude Code
• Isolated sessions in crystl
• Running two agents on the same repo