Dropstone vs Orca: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Dropstone and Orca — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Dropstone
Blankline
Self-hosted AI agent with long-term memory that spans CLI, chat, SDK and real-world actions, running on open-weight models you host.
Key features
- Persistent Cross-Surface Memory: Teach the agent something once in the CLI and it already knows it in chat, in the SDK and on a phone call — memory persists per user across sessions and surfaces instead of dying with one login.
- Self-Hosted Open-Weight Stack: Run the entire agent inside your own walls on your keys, machines and network, using open weights the company hosts or local models through Ollama, so source code never leaves your infrastructure.
- Proactive Background Operation: The agent is already running rather than waiting to be opened — it monitors what you asked it to watch and hands back only the decision that was actually yours.
- Approval-Gated Real-World Actions: Control smart-home devices, monitor an inbox around the clock, place phone calls and look up half-remembered contacts, with every action gated behind an explicit approval.
- 1M-Token Context on Every Tier: A one-million-token context window is included even on the free plan, letting the agent hold an entire repository in mind at once.
- Model-Agnostic Tiering: Dropstone Fast, Pro and Heavy each run whatever tops the open-weight leaderboards that month rather than being tied to a single lab.
- Learned Skills: The agent picks up skills it does not yet have, retains them and reuses them without being asked twice, with the skill list growing month over month.
- Multi-Surface Access: Reach the same agent through the Dropstone CLI, a web dashboard, VS Code / Cursor / Windsurf extensions and Remote MCP connectors, with sandboxed code execution and plan mode before changes apply.
Best for
- Air-Gapped Engineering Teams: Ship real code with an AI agent while keeping the models, the repository and the network entirely inside company infrastructure.
- Always-On Inbox Triage: Let the agent watch an inbox around the clock and surface or act on the messages that matter instead of checking it yourself.
- Terminal-Native Development: Use the CLI agent to generate code, run it in a sandbox and open diffs, with plan mode and approval gates before anything is applied.
- Personal Operations Automation: Hand off recurring real-world tasks — smart-home control, placing a call, chasing a contact — to an agent that already has your context.
- Cost-Sensitive Heavy Usage: Get several times more weekly coding usage per dollar than subscription coding CLIs by running on self-hosted open-weight models.
- Custom Agent Integration: Embed the same memory-backed agent into your own stack through the SDK and Remote MCP connectors.
O
Orca
Stably AI
Desktop AI orchestrator that runs Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, and Pi side by side in parallel git worktrees, all tracked in one place.
Key features
- Parallel Agent Worktrees: Fan one prompt across up to five agents, each in its own isolated git worktree — compare results and merge the winner.
- Multi-Agent Support: Run Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, and Pi side by side, all tracked in one unified interface.
- Mobile Companion App: Monitor and steer your agents from iOS or Android — get notified when an agent finishes and send follow-ups from anywhere.
- Ghostty-Class Terminals: WebGL-rendered terminal splits with infinite panes and scrollback that survives restarts.
- Design Mode Browser: Click any UI element in the embedded Chromium window to send its HTML, CSS, and a cropped screenshot straight into your agent's prompt.
- Cross-Platform Desktop: Native builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux so the orchestrator runs alongside your existing dev environment.
- Unified Prompt & History Tracking: Every prompt, tool call, and terminal action across all agents is captured in one place for easy review.
- Steer from Anywhere: Follow-up prompts from the mobile companion keep long-running agent runs moving even when you step away from the desk.
Best for
- Prompt Bake-Off: Send the same feature request to Codex, Claude Code, and OpenCode simultaneously and merge whichever branch wins.
- Long-Running Refactors: Kick off multi-hour agent runs in isolated worktrees and check in from your phone as they progress.
- Design-to-Code Handoff: Click a live UI element in Design Mode and hand its markup and a screenshot to the agent for pixel-accurate implementation.
- Parallel Bug Reproduction: Try multiple diagnostic approaches at once — each agent operates on its own worktree without collision.
- Terminal-Heavy Workflows: Use Ghostty-class terminal splits to keep build watchers, servers, and agent output visible side by side.
- Team Handoffs: Track every agent action in one place so the next engineer can pick up context without replaying a chat log.