Conan vs Juggler: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Conan and Juggler — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Conan
Conan
Conan is a native macOS app that wraps Claude Code in a live HUD, surfacing every prompt, tool call, skill, and token in real time.
Key features
- Live Timeline: Every command, edit, and tool call streams onto a living timeline as it happens.
- Context Window Meter: Watch the context window fill across system, tools, memory, skills, and messages while tokens burn in real time.
- Session Pulse: A live throughput pulse that spikes when Claude works and calms when it waits.
- Skills & MCP Visibility: See every skill and MCP server in play, surfaced and observable as they fire.
- Native macOS App: A native HUD for Apple silicon Macs running macOS 13+, with no subscription required.
- Claude Radio: Built-in curated audio stations to score your coding sessions.
Best for
- Monitoring Claude Code Sessions: Watch every prompt, tool call, and skill execution in real time without scrolling logs.
- Token Budget Management: Track context window usage and token burn to avoid context rot and surprise costs.
- Debugging Agent Behavior: Observe which skills and MCP servers fire to understand and debug agentic workflows.
- Staying In Flow: Keep a glanceable HUD of session activity while focusing on the work itself.
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.
