openrig vs Phrony: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

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

openrig

mvschwarz

Free

OpenRig is open-source software to define a team of Claude Code and Codex agents in YAML and run them as one persistent, managed system.

YAML Rig Definitions: Describe an agent team with roles in YAML and boot it with a single command.
Mixed Harnesses: Run Claude Code and Codex agents together in the same rig, managed as one system.
Lead Agent Coordination: Talk to a lead agent that coordinates specialists across teams and reports back decisions needing attention.
Persistent Teams: Keep team work and context at stable addresses instead of a pile of terminal sessions.
Terminal UI: View the rig as a graph or a table of seats showing runtime, model, context and state, with per-seat detail.
Guided First Use: A getting-started path installs, launches a two-agent team in your repository and produces one reviewed change.
Permission Allowances: Optionally lets your agent add scoped native rules so OpenRig commands run without repeated prompts, with an undo.
CLI Install: Distributed as @openrig/cli on npm, requiring Node.js 22 or 24 and tmux on macOS or Linux.

Multi-Agent Coding Teams: Stand up a persistent team of coding agents with defined roles for a repository.
Cross-Harness Workflows: Combine Claude Code and Codex strengths within one coordinated team.
Outcome-Driven Delegation: Describe a desired outcome to a lead agent and let it split work among specialists.
Agent Monitoring: Watch seats, models, context and state of many agents from one terminal UI.
Reviewed Changes: Have agents produce a change in a repo and another review it before you merge.
Agent Research Experiments: Prototype and study networks of cooperating agents on your own machine.

Freemium

Ship AI agents without the operational burden