I tested 10 AI agent orchestrators. Here's My Setup.

Until a few days ago, I was a hardcore Conductor user. I used it almost every day for 6 months.

Then they shipped their cloud version. It's a cool feature, and I'd been waiting for their mobile app for months, but it comes with a price tag: $50/month minimum, with usage costs on top of that later.

If, like me, you'd rather not pay that much when most alternatives are open source and free, keep reading! I spent the last week testing every option I could find, and I'll tell you which one I landed on.

One important thing before we start: you'll quickly notice that all these tools are converging on the same paradigm. Nobody is doing anything radically new, they're mostly copying each other's features.

PS: I included a HUGE comparative table at the end of this article.

What am I looking for

I may not have the same requirements as you do. I want:

• A good design
• A mobile app
• Being able to use multiple providers
• Bonus: the ability to host the server (daemon) on my homelab, so that my agents work from home and I orchestrate them from anywhere
• Ideally, an open source solution to be able to make it mine by forking it

The 3 “C”: Claude, Cursor and Codex

Claude is not open source, has a super bad design on desktop and mobile, and can’t be hosted on my server.

I stopped using Cursor in 2025 when I realized I was paying a ridiculous price per token. Maybe things have changed, but I don’t trust the company and I don’t see this product as a nice business model.

Codex is amazing. In my opinion, it’s the one of most advanced AI coding agent tool today. But the question is: are you ok to be restricted to Open AI models only? I’m not 😅.

So let’s explore the alternatives!

The other alternatives I didn’t try too much

• Synara: Fork of T3 Code. Super young, still missing a mobile app, no server daemon. I really like the design, and where it’s headed. I’ll keep an eye on it, especially if they decide to add a daemon in the future!
• Jean: Super opinionated, too “terminal-ish” for me, and messy design in my opinion.
• Superset: No mobile app yet, no server/daemon unless you pay and use their cloud.
• AMP: I honestly don’t get it. I don’t understand their website, it’s not open source, they don’t have a mobile app, you can’t use other providers… 🤷🏻‍♂️

The winners

If you made it this far, there are only 3 alternatives remaining: T3 Code, Orca, and Paseo.

I tried them all intensively.

T3 Code was the least interesting: it’s still young, lacks a lot of features, is unstable (especially if you try to host a server somewhere) and has a few weird UX choices. It’s super clean and simple though, and I’ll keep an eye on it in the future.

Between the 2 remaining products, Orca and Paseo, the choice was not easy… Orca is backed by YC, Paseo is maintained by one person only.

I encountered a few bugs with Orca, especially with their “Chat UI” that’s still in experimentation (I don’t want to use a terminal view) and struggled a bit to install it on my VPS. Also, I’m not always a fan of their UI: there are too many elements on the screen all the time for my taste. But beside that, Orca is the most powerful and complete solution out there, even beating Codex in terms of features. It even has an integrated mobile emulator!

Paseo’s strength is clearly its daemon service. I installed the server on my VPS and on my mac, the mobile app on my iphone, and a few minutes later I was able to use it on all my devices, seamlessly. The experience was perfect 👌🏻. On the contrary to Orca, they use Docker, which simplify the installation a lot. I like their design more than Orca’s, and I encountered a grand total of 0 bugs the past 48h. I forked it to add a few tiny things I was missing, like a sound notification when the AI is done.

It has less features than Orca, but it feels better to use. Also, I’m more willing to put my trust in an indie dev rather than on a company backed by YC, that will eventually have to milk its users 😅.

In the end, I think both Orca and Paseo (and Codex if you want to stay with Open AI) are the best solutions out there.

No matter which one you chose, I only have one advice to give you: once you’ve found the one you like, stick with it. Don’t waste too much time trying new ones all the time 😄.

Conclusion

So: I switched to Paseo. It's my daily driver now, running on my Mac, my VPS and my iPhone, and I don't plan on moving again anytime soon.

That said, I'm keeping Orca installed. It's the most feature-complete tool of the bunch, and most of what held me back (the Chat UI still being experimental, the busy interface, the painful VPS install) is the kind of thing that gets fixed in a release or two. If they clean that up, the gap becomes hard to ignore. I'll update this article if it happens.

The comparative table