Hand Wave vs Juggler: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Hand Wave and Juggler — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Hand Wave
Aadi Sanghvi
Real-time sign language recognition for a webcam or screen share that turns hand signs into text and speech in the browser.
Key features
- Live Camera Recognition: Recognises sign language directly from the device webcam without an install.
- Screen Share Recognition: Runs against any screen share, so signs in a video call can be captioned live.
- Text and Speech Output: Emits the recognised signs as caption text and can speak them out loud.
- On-Device Vision: Model runs in the browser tab — the video stream is not uploaded to a server.
- Zero-Setup Web App: Opens in the browser with two buttons — Start Camera or Share Screen.
- Smart-Glasses Friendly: Designed to work with a phone or smart-glasses camera feed for real-world conversations.
Best for
- Deaf-Hearing Conversations: Sign into the camera and let a hearing person read or hear the translation live.
- Accessible Video Calls: Add a live sign-to-text overlay to Zoom/Meet calls via screen share.
- Live Stream Captions: Twitch or YouTube creators who sign can auto-caption their broadcast.
- Classroom and Meeting Access: A Deaf student or colleague signs, everyone else sees text in real time.
- Assistive Wearables: Pair with smart glasses so signs are turned into audible speech for the person opposite.
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.
