Pi Web vs Port Radar for macOS: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Pi Web and Port Radar for macOS — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
P
Pi Web
agegr
Local web UI for the Pi coding agent — browse sessions, switch worktrees, manage models, and chat beside your project files in a browser.
Key features
- Session Browser: Reads local Pi session files and organizes prior conversations by project for quick resume.
- Fork and Continue: Continue from any earlier message or fork a session into a separate route to try alternatives safely.
- Git Worktree Switcher: Switch between Git worktrees from the sidebar to work on multiple branches in parallel.
- File Preview: Side-by-side chat and project file browser that previews source, docs, images, audio, and PDFs.
- Model and Skill Manager: Configure models, API keys, run model tests, and toggle skills from the web UI instead of CLI flags.
- Local-Only Runtime: Runs on http://127.0.0.1 by default so session data and code never leave the developer's machine.
Best for
- Resume Prior Work: Reopen a conversation from last week by project instead of scrolling terminal history.
- Safe Experimentation: Fork a session to try a risky refactor without losing the original conversation state.
- Parallel Branch Work: Switch Git worktrees mid-session to jump between feature branches in one workspace.
- Model Comparison: Rerun the same task against different configured models to compare output quality.
- In-Browser Code Review: Preview generated diffs and project files beside the chat without leaving the browser.
Port Radar for macOS
Juan Sebastian Solano
Free open-source Mac menu bar app that lists every listening localhost port and uses on-device Apple Intelligence to explain what each process is.
Key features
- Menu Bar Port Scanner: Lists every listening localhost port in the menu bar with port number, PID, owning project, runtime, and the exact command line.
- Apple Intelligence Explanations: Ask in plain language what a process is, why it has been running, and whether stopping it is safe; answers are generated on-device with no cloud call.
- Project Grouping: Groups processes by the project directory that owns them and flags shared or orphaned processes with no obvious parent.
- One-Click Cloudflare Tunnels: Share any local port as a public URL through a Cloudflare quick tunnel, auto-installing cloudflared with no CLI, ngrok, or account setup.
- Clean Process Control: Stop a process gracefully or force-quit it with a confirmation step, directly from the menu bar.
- Live Tunnel Management: See which tunnels are currently live and public, copy their URLs, and stop them at any time.
- Fully On-Device Privacy: All inspection and AI explanation happens locally; no process data or command lines are sent off the machine.
- Open Source Under Apache 2.0: The full source is published on GitHub, so the app can be audited or built from source.
Best for
- Port Conflict Debugging: Finding out which forgotten process is holding port 3000 before starting a new dev server.
- Runaway Process Triage: Identifying a Node or Python process quietly eating CPU and deciding whether it is safe to kill.
- Preview Sharing: Handing a teammate or client a live public URL for a work-in-progress local app in seconds.
- Multi-Project Development: Keeping track of which of several simultaneously running projects owns each active port.
- Onboarding and Handover: Letting a developer new to a codebase understand what the local stack actually starts up.
- Privacy-Sensitive Environments: Getting AI assistance about local processes in settings where sending command lines to a cloud model is unacceptable.