Catenary vs Farol: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

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

Catenary

Freemium

Local-first spatial IDE that orchestrates Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other coding agents on an infinite canvas with visual context wires.

Infinite Canvas: Terminals, Monaco editors, browsers, and git worktrees float on one pannable, zoomable surface so every agent stays visible at once.
Context Wires: Drag a directed wire between panels to pass context to another agent, set to relay automatically or act as a standing permission.
One-Click Worktrees: The New Task button creates an isolated branch, working directory, and agent, colour-coded across sidebar, dock, and canvas.
Monaco Diffs: VS Code's editor inside the canvas with git-aware file tree and side-by-side diffs of everything an agent touched.
Maestro Mode: One agent recruits, briefs, and wires a team of up to ten helpers, with an editable approval card before every action.
Multi-Project Parallelism: Run several projects at once, each with its own canvas and multiple isolated branches, with state preserved on switch.
Local-First Privacy: No account, no telemetry, and zero bytes of source code, prompts, or keys sent anywhere; only two outbound hosts total.
Bring Your Own Keys: Agent CLIs talk directly to Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google with your own keys, or to Ollama and LM Studio on localhost.

A developer runs three coding agents on separate branches simultaneously and watches all of them without losing track of any.
An engineer delegates a specific subtask from one agent to another by dragging a wire instead of copy-pasting context between windows.
A team working under strict data policies needs an agent IDE that provably never uploads source code.
A solo builder ships several experiments in parallel isolated worktrees without polluting the main working tree.
A reviewer wants side-by-side diffs of agent-authored changes before deciding what to keep.
A user orchestrates a self-organizing squad of agents while keeping human approval on every structural change.

Lucas Neves Pereira

Free

A free, open source native macOS terminal for supervising Claude Code, Codex and other AI coding agents side by side.

Agent Status Sidebar: Shows at a glance which coding agent is working, which needs your input and which has finished, with a colored status dot per session.
Git Worktree Tasks: Describe a task, pick an agent, and Farol creates a git worktree on a new branch and starts the agent there so parallel agents never conflict.
Menu Bar and Notch Panel: A lighthouse menu bar item or notch panel and macOS notifications keep you posted on agent state while you work in other apps.
Diff Review and Shipping: View every changed file as a diff, then commit, push and open a pull request on GitHub or GitLab from the app.
Files and Git Graph: Browse the project as a tree, make quick fixes in a light editor and inspect a graph of every branch and commit.
Built on libghostty: Native Mac app with Ghostty's speed, themes and configuration support.
Multi-Agent Support: Claude Code and Codex report status once connected; any other terminal agent works via Farol's CLI or the terminal bell.

Parallel Agent Development: Run several Claude Code or Codex agents on separate branches of the same repo without file conflicts.
Agent Supervision: Monitor multiple long-running coding agents and respond only when one is waiting for you.
Code Review Before Merge: Inspect agent-generated diffs and open pull requests directly from the terminal.
Background Task Delegation: Kick off a task, switch to other apps and get notified through the notch or menu bar when it needs you.
Ghostty Migration: Keep an existing Ghostty config and themes while gaining agent-aware session management.