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

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

Juggler

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.

mpai (open source)

Free

Terminal-native, open-source tool that lets a teammate join your live Claude Code or Codex session over a private tailnet.

Live Session Join: A teammate opens your in-flight Codex or Claude Code conversation from their own terminal without losing context.
Named Identity Prompting: Every prompt is attributed to the person who typed it, so audit trails show who steered the agent.
Private Tailnet Transport: Sessions travel over a Tailscale-style overlay network — no public relay, no third-party server.
Terminal-Native, No New IDE: Works with the CLI agents you already run; nothing changes about your editor or model.
Ephemeral Rooms: Start a short-lived room (e.g. 5-minute) for a quick pair session and it closes on its own.
Access Controls and Audit: Presence, transcript, list, and prompt routes all share the same access check with an audit log.
Open Source: Full source is on GitHub; self-host end to end.

Pair Debugging: Hand a stuck agent session to a teammate so they can prompt from their own terminal without cloning context.
Code Review of Agent Work: Reviewer joins live to steer or challenge the agent instead of reading the diff cold.
Onboarding: Senior engineer takes a junior through a real agent session in real time.
Long-Running Task Hand-off: Pass a multi-hour Codex refactor to the next shift without losing the running conversation.
Security-Conscious Teams: Collaborate on agent work without routing traffic through a hosted SaaS relay.