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

A side-by-side comparison of Juggler and tterm — 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.

Tanay Gondil

Free

Free macOS workspace that unites a terminal, a real Chromium browser, and Claude Code in one hot-reloadable, self-building window.

Self-Building Workspace: ⌘K invokes Claude Code on tterm's own source and hot-reloads the running app so you can extend the tool from inside itself.
Row-Per-Project Layout: Every project gets its own row containing an explorer, a Claude Code session, and a file viewer, so multiple projects stack side by side.
Embedded Real Browser: ⌘B opens a Chromium tab inside tterm that inherits your Chrome cookies, bookmarks, and history — favicons and all.
Diff-Only Review: ⌘G opens a hunk-level diff reviewer for staging and committing changes; there's no editor by design, so you review instead of retype.
Command-Palette Shortcuts: ⌘K palette, ⌘O projects, ⌘P quick open, ⌘⇧F search, ⌘F find, ⌘⇧M for CLAUDE.md, and more make navigation keyboard-first.
Terminal-Respecting Key Handling: Only ⌘-chords are intercepted by tterm; every ⌃-key passes through to the pty untouched, so terminal apps keep working.
Privacy by Default: No account, no telemetry, and no network calls home — the app is a single ad-hoc-signed hobby build.

AI-Paired Coding: Keep Claude Code, your terminal, and docs in one window while pairing with an LLM on a project.
Multi-Project Juggling: Stack several concurrent projects as rows so you can jump between them without alt-tabbing.
Doc-Grounded Development: Use the embedded browser to keep API docs open next to your terminal and diff without leaving the app.
Focused Diff Review: Review and stage AI-generated changes hunk by hunk before committing, rather than editing in place.
Hobbyist macOS Tinkering: Extend the tool itself from inside via Claude Code, treating tterm as a live playground.