CTRL Micro vs Juggler: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

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

CTRL Micro

MedHue Labs

Free

Turns an iPhone or iPad into a haptic control deck for your Mac and for AI coding agents like Claude, Codex and Cursor.

Haptic Control Deck: A customisable board of controls that responds with haptics, sound and visual feedback so actions can be triggered without looking.
Agent Task Monitoring: Shows progress and attention states for Codex, Claude and Cursor tasks at a glance, and lets you reopen recent tasks or start new ones.
Client-Specific Controls: Switches the deck between Mac control and per-agent control surfaces tailored to Codex, Claude and Cursor.
Full Mac Control: Launches applications, adjusts volume, brightness, media and windows, moves the pointer, scrolls, clicks, runs Shortcuts and invokes Siri.
Local Dictation: Dictates into desktop apps from the deck with transcription processed locally by CTRL Micro Host on the Mac rather than in the cloud.
Desktop View: Streams the Mac screen above the controls or full screen, with pinch, pan and double-tap to inspect detail.
Remote Anywhere: End-to-end encrypted remote sessions where the relay forwards opaque data and cannot read screen or control content.
No-Account Privacy Model: Requires no CTRL Micro account, keeps nearby connections direct between devices, and stores no screen frames, keystrokes or dictation.

Agent Babysitting: Keep an eye on long-running Claude Code or Codex tasks from a second screen and step in the moment one needs attention.
Hands-Free Dictation: Dictate prompts or documentation into Mac apps from the iPad while keeping the keyboard free for other work.
Desk Ergonomics: Move frequently used Mac shortcuts and media controls onto a physical-feeling deck instead of hunting through menus.
Remote Mac Access: Check on and control a Mac at the office from elsewhere over an end-to-end encrypted Remote Anywhere session.
Multi-Agent Workflows: Switch between Codex, Claude and Cursor sessions from one deck when several agents are working in parallel.
Privacy-Sensitive Environments: Control a Mac and transcribe speech without creating an account or sending screen content to a vendor.

Julian Storer

Free

A native desktop workbench for AI coding agents with branching conversation trees, inspectable tool calls and editable context.

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.

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.