Agents Never Sleep vs Juggler: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Agents Never Sleep and Juggler — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Agents Never Sleep
Agents Never Sleep
A tiny $4.99 Mac menu bar app that keeps long-running AI agents alive with the laptop lid closed, using one three-level slider.
Key features
- Closed-Lid Operation: Keeps agents and background jobs running with the MacBook lid shut, which the built-in caffeinate command cannot do.
- Three-Level Slider: One control with Sleepy, Awake, and Never sleeps settings, so changing sleep behavior takes a single drag rather than a terminal command.
- Menu Bar Only: Lives entirely in the menu bar with no window, dock icon, or configuration screens to manage.
- Native and Tiny: A small native macOS binary rather than a wrapped web app, minimizing overhead on a machine already running agents.
- Zero Data Collection: No telemetry, analytics, or tracking; what runs on the machine stays on the machine.
- Safe Revert: Toggling back down restores normal sleep behavior, avoiding the common mistake of leaving sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1 permanently enabled.
- No-Questions Refund: A 14-day money-back guarantee with no form to fill in and no reason required.
Best for
- Overnight Agent Runs: Letting a coding agent work through a long task while the laptop is closed and put away.
- Long Builds and Tests: Preventing a multi-hour build, test suite, or data job from being interrupted mid-run by sleep.
- Mobile Working: Carrying a MacBook between rooms or offices without propping the lid open to keep a job alive.
- Model Downloads and Training: Keeping large model downloads or local fine-tuning runs going unattended.
- Avoiding pmset Mistakes: Replacing manual sudo pmset toggles that are easy to enable and easy to forget to undo.
- Remote Sessions: Keeping a Mac reachable and working for a remote session or background service while it sits closed on a desk.
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.