agent-manager vs Local: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of agent-manager and Local — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

agent-manager

Yoan Wai

Free

Go TUI on top of tmux that spawns, tracks, and reviews Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other coding agents in one keypress.

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.

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.

Base Compute

Free

A macOS app that runs chat, coding and meeting AI entirely on your own Mac, with no cloud, no account and no per-token cost.

BaseRT Chip-Tuned Engine: Base Compute's inference runtime compiles for your specific Apple silicon on first launch, claiming up to 5.4x more tokens per second than engines other local apps ship.
Privacy Mode: Every request runs on the Mac and no data leaves the device — memories are stored locally, and facts marked sensitive are pinned to the machine permanently.
In-Folder Agentic Coding: Point Local at a project and it reads, edits and runs code in place without ever uploading the codebase.
On-Device Meeting Transcription: Meetings are transcribed locally with speakers labelled, so recordings and transcripts never reach a third-party service.
Memory You Can Edit: A short, fully visible list of lasting facts about you that you can review, edit or delete, rather than an opaque profile.
Memory-Aware Model Recommendations: Local reads your chip and RAM (8-16 GB, 24 GB, or 32-128 GB tiers) and suggests which open models will actually run well.
Office Mode: Serve the largest model from your fastest machine — Mac Studio, AMD Strix Halo, NVIDIA DGX Spark or an on-prem server — and reach it from Local on every laptop in the office.
Cost and Speed Analytics: A dashboard showing tokens processed, per-model throughput, and the equivalent cloud API cost you avoided.

Confidential Document Review: Drop a contract or PDF into chat and get a summary without the file ever touching a cloud provider.
Regulated-Industry Coding: Work agentically inside a proprietary codebase at a firm whose policy forbids uploading source to external AI services.
Private Meeting Notes: Transcribe internal calls with speaker attribution while keeping the audio on the laptop.
Zero-Marginal-Cost Experimentation: Run heavy prompt iteration without watching a per-token meter, since inference happens on hardware you already own.
Small-Office AI Server: Host a large open model on the one powerful Mac in the office and let the whole team query it from their own laptops.
Offline Fieldwork: Keep a full chat and coding assistant available on a flight or at a site with no reliable connectivity.
Hybrid Frontier Access: Keep everyday work local and connect your own OpenAI or Anthropic key only for the rare job that needs a frontier model.