agent-orchestrator vs herdr
Desktop agent IDE for fleets of coding agents: each task gets a worker with its own workspace and agent CLI, while a project orchestrator plans work and handles CI fixes, conflicts and reviews. — versus — Agent multiplexer for your terminal: every Claude Code/Codex session in real panes — blocked/working/done at a glance, detach and reattach over SSH, plus a socket API agents drive themselves.
Both supervise many concurrent coding-agent sessions at a glance. Herdr is a terminal multiplexer you can detach and reattach over SSH with a socket API; AO is a desktop app with Kanban and a planning orchestrator above the workers.
| agent-orchestrator | herdr | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 11k | 34k |
| Forks | 1.5k | 2.5k |
| Language | Go | Rust |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Last activity | today | today |
| Topics | coding, orchestration, agents | coding, orchestration |
| Curated connections | 6 | 5 |
agent-orchestrator — the curator's take
The one to try if you want a GUI cockpit rather than a terminal multiplexer — a background daemon, a Kanban over live workers, isolated workspaces and browsers per task, and an orchestrator that will actually decompose an outcome into tasks and sequence them. That framing costs scriptability: it is a desktop product first, so headless CI use and remote-only setups fit worse than tmux-style tools, and you still install and configure every agent CLI yourself. The isolated-workspace-per-worker discipline is the part worth stealing even if you don't adopt the app.
herdr — the curator's take
tmux, rebuilt for the agent era: real terminal views (not wrapped reinterpretations), sessions that survive restarts and reattach over SSH, prefix keys AND mouse both first-class. The differentiator is the socket API — agents can spawn panes, read each other's output and wait on each other, which turns the multiplexer itself into coordination infrastructure, and the plugin marketplace suggests real ecosystem ambition. NOT an orchestrator: no task queues, no verification gates, no workflow graphs — it multiplexes and observes, you still decide. If you've already shaped your life around tmux, the marginal win is the agent-state awareness; weigh the switching cost honestly.