Orchemax
Orchemax vs other agent orchestrators
Orchemax is an agent orchestrator: it directs the coding CLIs you already pay for. Personal-assistant gateways such as OpenClaw and Hermes, and agent frameworks such as CrewAI, AutoGen and LangGraph, are seats and libraries an orchestrator drives — not competitors, so they are not in this table. Primary peer: Traycer.
The matrix
Every cell is a fact from the 2026-09-15 orchestrator scan or Not documented — never a guess. Where a peer beats us, it is named under the table.
Swipe sideways to read every column.
| Capability | Traycer | Paperclip | Gas Town + Beads | Kiro Crew | claude-squad | Orchemax |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where it sits | VS Code extension and desktop app, above your agent | Node server + React UI; agents attach to it | gt workspace manager over tmux; bd is a second CLI |
Gateway + dashboard, run as a systemd/launchd service | tmux TUI holding one session per agent | Under the CLI you already opened: MCP tools plus one harness hook, no new window |
| Who directs | Plan-first modes drive the agents; a second director is Not documented | Org chart of “employees”, approval gates above them | “Mayor” — a Claude Code instance runs convoys; no second-director rule documented | A crew delegates to subagents; you approve tool requests, no single-director rule | No director: instances are independent, you switch between them | One Chair per project by arrival order; the second is refused |
| Collision handling | Plans before anyone writes; no file locks documented | Atomic task checkout plus budget — business level, not file level | Worktree per polecat, claimed bead, bisecting merge queue (Refinery) | Not documented — the README names no worktrees, locks or merge queue | One git workspace per instance; isolation by checkout, no fine locks | Worktree and a shared lock with TTL taken before the shared edit — no merge queue |
| Duplicate prevention | Shared memory across models — context, not symbols | Reuse of documented skills per agent; no symbol registry | Dependency graph in Dolt, queryable by SQL — tasks, not code symbols | Not documented; semantic memory in-process, not a typed symbol law | None — it is a terminal manager | guard dup on PreToolUse plus the exported-signature registry (orch:export) |
| Governance | Review Mode as a first-class mode; boards a human co-edits live | Org charts, budgets, approval gates, versioned config, safe rollback | Convoys, Mayor and bd remember; no mandatory human gate documented |
Interactive approvals in chat, deny-by-default command catalog, protected-path blocking, kirocrew security verify |
No ledger; you read the diffs by hand before applying | Ledger with task_claim on the line itself, plus verify_report |
| Heterogeneous workers | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode — a “fully supported” table | OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor | Claude Code, Copilot, Codex, Gemini; bd setup wires more |
kiro-cli over ACP; the README names no second coding CLI |
A -p flag swaps claude / codex / aider / gemini |
ACP client for Gemini CLI and OpenCode (opt-in agents.transport: acp); Codex, Claude and Cursor as subprocesses |
| Cost read-out | No credit meters on your own subscription; its own inference is billed apart | Budget enforced per agent and per task, atomically | None native; scheduler.max_polecats caps concurrency, not spend |
Not documented — no token count, cost or budget in the README | None — each instance spends whatever its CLI spends | orch usage · --leaks · --governance read your own transcripts; Team caps a task’s budget before it spawns |
| Code stays local | Local host; the cloud may sync task data, Privacy Mode is a paid tier | Yes — MIT, self-hosted Node server | Yes — OSS and local; Beads leaves only if you dolt push |
Yes — Mac, local container or a remote machine you control | Yes — OSS tmux on your machine | Yes — the runtime is local; a linked account receives counters and events, never code |
Where they beat us today. Gas Town’s Refinery is a bisecting merge queue that batches merge requests, runs the gates and isolates the bad one; Orchemax has no merge queue at all. Paperclip enforces a budget and an approval gate before an agent spends, with versioned config and safe rollback of a bad change. Kiro Crew (AWS, Apache-2.0) runs scheduled work around the clock as a system service, shows each agent’s plan, tool calls, approval gates and results in one Activity view, and keeps a verifiable security-event log. Traycer’s Review Mode and shared boards let a human co-edit next to the agents in real time. Multica, left out for lack of a locatable repo, drives about twelve CLIs — more than anyone in the table.
Not in the table, for width: Conductor (Melty Labs) — closed-source Mac app, git worktree per agent with diff-first review, Claude Code and Codex only, no open API to add a third, no meter of its own (“you pay only your API cost”), and no duplicate prevention documented.
Choose Gas Town if merge throughput across twenty agents is the bottleneck. Choose Paperclip if spend caps and approvals matter more than code-level dedup. Choose Kiro Crew if you want unattended 24/7 runs on one vendor’s CLI with a sandboxed, audited command surface. Choose Traycer if planning and live human review boards are the job. Choose claude-squad or Conductor if parallel sessions in isolated worktrees is all you need. Choose Orchemax if the CLI you already opened should stay the CLI you open — with a lock, a registry, a claim and a measured read-out underneath it. We sell governed workshops and a CTO overlook, not another agent IDE. Deep dive: Orchemax vs Traycer.