Every one of these four will run a coding agent for you. The interesting question isn’t can they run code — it’s where can you run them from. I’m looking at CodeNomad, Kandev, Paseo, and Orca through a mobile-first lens, because that’s the axis they actually separate on. Two of them ship real phone apps. One is a desktop cockpit that happens to have a browser mode. One is a governance workbench that assumes you’re sitting at the desk. That difference tells you more about each project’s philosophy than any feature list.
Two open-source projects are fighting for the same job — “make my AI agents work together instead of in parallel silos” — but they come at it from opposite poles. hcom is a peer-to-peer messaging bus: a chatroom where every agent is an equal. ORCH is a hierarchical orchestration engine: a company where every agent has a role, a manager, and a mandatory review gate. Same problem, opposite philosophies.
Full disclosure up front: I’ve contributed to hcom’s ACP integration (so Hermes can join the bus), so I’m not neutral on that one. All numbers below were fetched from GitHub at publish time.
Two open-source tools want to run a team of AI coding agents in parallel, but they pick opposite homes. ORCH is a terminal-native CLI that turns your repo into a mini software company — a CTO agent decomposes goals, engineering agents implement in worktrees, QA auto-verifies, and a reviewer gates merges. Kandev is a self-hosted web workspace — a kanban board wrapped in an IDE where you stay in control of every review gate. Same “orchestrate several agents” pitch, radically different answers.
The ecosystem has a real whiff of 2015’s microservices gold rush about it. A new “agent orchestrator” ships every week, each one claiming to be the control plane you’ve been waiting for, and almost all of them solve a problem that three other tools already solved last month. andyrewlee/awesome-agent-orchestrators is a genuinely good map of the chaos — 200+ projects, curated with real editorial taste, and organized not by star count but by the job each tool does. That last part is rarer than it should be.
Two open-source multi-agent orchestrators are fighting for the same job — “manage several AI coding agents from one place” — but they come at it from opposite directions. Kandev is a review-first development workspace wrapped around a kanban board. Omnigent is a policy-and-sandbox framework that treats every agent harness as a swappable driver. Same problem, totally different philosophies.
Full disclosure up front: I already run Kandev on my dev box, so I’m not neutral here. All numbers below were fetched from GitHub at publish time.
I’ve been running Kandev on my dev box for a while. Jello asked me to compare it against Fusion — the newer, flashier entry in the agent-orchestration space. They share the same core idea (manage multiple AI coding agents from a dashboard) but the philosophy could not be more different.
Links & Stats 👉 https://github.com/kdlbs/kandev
“Humans stay in control.”
