agent-manager vs Juggler: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of agent-manager and Juggler — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
a
agent-manager
Yoan Wai
Go TUI on top of tmux that spawns, tracks, and reviews Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other coding agents in one keypress.
Key features
- One-keypress Spawn: Hit space on a group row, type the task, press enter — a new agent session starts immediately with the prompt embedded and the correct working directory set, without any form or naming step.
- Answer In Place: On a session row, the same space key sends your reply into the agent's pane as a user message, so a blocked agent never costs you a tmux attach.
- Multi-CLI Support: Tab cycles which CLI the next enter launches — claude, opencode, codex, grok, gemini, or anything you configured — so different tasks pick different agents from the same bar.
- Git Worktree Spawn: alt+w spawns the agent into a fresh git worktree so parallel branches don't fight over the checkout.
- Hook-based Status Detection: Six statuses (working, waiting, finished, errored, idle, dead) come from Claude Code's own hook events rather than guessing from pane output.
- Foldable Project Tree: Groups are paths, not folders — backend/api/auth nests as deep as the work does, folded groups keep per-status counts, and the layout persists across restarts.
- Whole-file Diff Reviewer: Review each agent's diff without leaving the list; line comments become follow-up messages to that agent.
- Uses Your Local CLI As-is: Every session runs your installed CLI with your login, config, and MCP servers — nothing is re-wrapped or proxied.
Best for
- Parallel Feature Work: Fan out five features across five agents in seconds and monitor them all in one folded tree without switching terminals.
- Reviewing Blocked Agents: Answer a permission prompt or clarifying question directly from the list without tmux-attaching, so waiting agents never idle on you.
- Multi-repo Development: Keep several projects open at once, spawn each new task into the correct project directory, and never lose track of which agent is where.
- Mixed CLI Workflows: Use Claude Code for one task, Codex for another, and opencode for a third — all launched from the same TUI without switching contexts.
- Diff-driven Code Review: Scan a whole-file diff, drop a line comment, and it becomes the next message to the agent, closing the review-fix loop inside the TUI.
- Long-running Agent Fleets: Fold what you aren't watching, archive finished sessions, and let dozens of agents run without the terminal turning into a wall of processes.
Juggler
Julian Storer
A native desktop workbench for AI coding agents with branching conversation trees, inspectable tool calls and editable context.
Key features
- Branching Conversation Trees: Fork the session at any point, recursively, so competing approaches and tangents run side by side without polluting the main context.
- Miller Column Navigation: A Finder-style column layout lays out tool calls, item properties and nested sub-threads for long reading and editing sessions.
- Transaction Inspector: Open any model transaction to see the assembled system prompt, messages, tool definitions, output, token use, timing and stop reason.
- The Context Surgeon: Fold history into a new thread, move or copy items between branches, expand a branch back into its parent, and undo structural changes.
- Local or Remote Sessions: Run the desktop app locally or the headless binary on the machine holding the code, then attach from the app, a browser or a phone.
- Durable Sessions: Sessions are stored on disk as live-synced Yjs documents, so quits, relaunches and dropped connections do not lose the conversation.
- Automatic Context Sizing: Juggler measures the full request before each call, reserves room for the answer and compacts older history before limits become an error.
- Inspectable MCP Tools: Follow an MCP handoff end to end - schema offered, arguments generated, approval, result and errors - with server status, logs and per-tool filtering.
- JavaScript Extension SDK: Context items, LLM loop strategies, slash commands, viewers and Pinboard tabs are extensions you can fork or replace, under a permissive Apache-2.0 SDK.
Best for
- Exploring Competing Fixes: Branch a thread into two sub-threads to try different approaches to the same bug and compare results before committing.
- Auditing Agent Behavior: Inspect exactly what the model received and returned when an agent makes a surprising edit to the codebase.
- Remote Development: Run the server on a dev box or GPU machine where the repository lives and drive the same live session from a laptop or browser.
- Long Refactors: Keep a multi-hour session alive across quits and reconnects, with the agent paused awaiting approval for its next step.
- Provider Comparison: Drive Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Gemini and local Ollama models through one interface to compare behavior on the same task.
- Custom Tooling: Write JavaScript extensions that add slash commands, file viewers or new LLM loop strategies to the workbench.