Coral vs Conductor: know when any agent needs you
Coral tells you the moment any agent waits on you, in your notch or on your iPhone, with no change to how you run them. Free forever; Pro is $8 a month.
Updated
Pick Coral if your agents keep waiting on you. Coral shows every agent that needs you in your Mac’s notch and on your iPhone, and you answer with one key or tap, wherever the agent runs: any terminal, your editor or the Codex app. Conductor is a Mac app for running parallel agents in worktrees, but you answer them inside its window, and its phone app is part of a $50 a month plan.
Running five agents at once doesn’t make you five times faster if three of them sit on a permission prompt while you’re in another window. When you run many agents, the bottleneck is you noticing. That’s the moment Coral is built for.
This page is about Conductor, the Mac app at conductor.build. As of October 2026, here’s how they compare.
Summary
| Conductor | Coral | |
|---|---|---|
| Works with the agents you already run | No. Agents run inside Conductor’s workspaces | Yes. Any terminal, tmux, VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf or the Codex app, started the way you always do |
| Answer without switching windows | No. You answer in the Conductor window | Yes. One key (1, 2 or 3) in the notch, ⌘Z to take it back |
| iPhone | iOS app, listed under Pro ($50 a month) | Free: alerts, every conversation to read, and answers that wait on your Mac until you press Return. Pro: answers go straight to the agent |
| Answer local agents from your phone | Its iOS announcement describes cloud workspaces, not local ones | Yes |
| Copilot CLI and Grok CLI | No | Yes |
| Your own servers over SSH | No. Cloud workspaces run on Conductor’s machines, and its pricing page says your own machines aren’t supported yet | Yes, Pro: Linux servers, other Macs and dev containers |
| Free plan | Free plan for local parallel agents | Free forever: every agent in the notch, one-key answers, iPhone and Apple Watch alerts |
| Paid plan | Pro $50 a month; Teams $60 a month per user | Pro $8 a month billed yearly or $12 monthly, or Founder Lifetime once |
| Worktrees, review and merge | Yes. One worktree per workspace, diff viewer, checks, PRs and merge | Not built in. D for the diff and P for a pull request when a task is done |
Neither app bills for model usage. You bring your own Claude or OpenAI subscription or API key to both.
Why developers pick Coral
- Nothing about how you work changes. Keep starting
claudeorcodexin tmux, Ghostty, iTerm2 or your editor’s terminal. Coral connects through hooks, lists exactly which files change and backs them up first. There’s no new window to live in. - The agent that waited longest is on top. Every agent lands in one list in your notch, grouped into Needs you, Done, Working and Idle. A soft chime when one asks. You stop checking tabs to find who’s stuck.
- One key and it’s back to work. Press 1, 2 or 3 to answer a permission prompt or a question. You see what the agent wrote just before asking and every option in full. Plans from Claude Code get a “Ready to code?” card with the plan below it.
- Your iPhone and Apple Watch, on Free. Alerts when an agent needs you or finishes, a Live Activity, and every agent’s conversation to read. You can answer from your phone on Free; it waits on your Mac until you press Return there. On Pro, it reaches the agent right away.
- Private by design. No Coral account and no Coral server that sees your code. Messages between your Mac and iPhone are encrypted end to end, and answers are signed with a key on your iPhone that Face ID protects. See Privacy and security.
- Agents on your servers. On Pro, agents on your SSH servers and dev containers show up in the same notch as local ones. On Linux servers, they can still reach your iPhone while your Mac sleeps. See Servers.
Coral also shows a one-line summary with time and tokens when a task finishes, and U shows what’s left of your Claude Code, Codex, Copilot and Grok plans, with when a limit runs out at your pace. The full list is in Features.
Where Conductor fits
Conductor is a good fit if you want one Mac app to own the whole loop and you mostly sit at that window:
- It runs the agents in worktrees. Each workspace is a separate checkout on a new branch, so parallel agents can’t step on each other’s files. Coral doesn’t create worktrees or split work across agents.
- Review in one place. Diff viewer, checks, PRs, merge and archive next to the chat, plus a builder and a reviewer chatting in the same workspace.
- Cloud and teams. Cloud workspaces on Pro, and multiplayer, an admin portal and SSO on the higher plans.
- Cursor’s agent. Conductor runs it through the Cursor API. Coral doesn’t support it.
Which should you pick
| Your situation | Pick |
|---|---|
| You run agents in the terminal or your editor and keep finding them stuck on a prompt | Coral |
| You want to answer agents from your iPhone or see alerts on your Apple Watch | Coral |
| You want to keep your setup and not move agents into a new app | Coral |
| You use Copilot CLI, the Grok CLI or the Codex app | Coral |
| You run agents on your own Linux servers or dev containers | Coral (Pro) |
| You want one app that makes a worktree per task, runs the agent and merges the PR | Conductor |
| You want agents in a hosted cloud, or a team sharing sessions | Conductor (Pro or Teams) |
Running parallel agents by hand? Our guide to running multiple Claude Code agents covers worktrees and tmux, and Coral keeps track of who’s waiting. Claude Squad is a free terminal option for the worktree side, and Coral sees its agents. For a board view, see Coral vs Vibe Kanban. All comparisons are on /compare.
Questions
Is Coral a Conductor alternative?
For the part that slows most people down, yes. Coral tells you which agent needs you and lets you answer from the notch or your iPhone, wherever it runs. It doesn’t create worktrees or merge PRs. If you already run parallel agents with git worktree and tmux, Coral is the missing piece.
Can I use Conductor and Coral together?
We haven’t confirmed it. Coral hears from Claude Code through the hooks in ~/.claude/settings.json, and Conductor ships its own copy of Claude Code. Its docs don’t say whether that copy runs your user hooks. Either way, Coral covers every agent you run outside Conductor.
Is Conductor free?
Conductor’s Free plan runs local parallel agents with your own subscriptions or API keys. Pro is $50 a month and adds cloud workspaces, multiplayer, the API and the mobile app.
Does Coral run agents in parallel?
You run as many agents as you like, in your own terminals, and Coral shows each one. It doesn’t create a worktree per agent the way Conductor does.
What does Coral cost?
Coral is free, with no end and no card. Pro is $8 a month billed yearly or $12 monthly, with a 7-day free trial, or Founder Lifetime as a one-time payment. See Pricing.