port22 vs Proto-Mind: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of port22 and Proto-Mind — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

port22

Freemium

Mobile remote for AI coding agents — pair your phone with a Mac companion and drive Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode from anywhere.

Attach to a Live Session: Drives the agent session you already started in your terminal rather than spawning a fork or shadow instance.
Multi-Agent Support: Works with Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode today, with OpenClaw and Hermes on the roadmap.
Live Token Streaming: Reads every token the agent produces as it thinks, edits files, and runs commands, streamed to your phone in real time.
Push Approvals: Sends a push the moment an agent finishes or needs input so you can approve or answer without opening the app.
Dynamic Island & Lock-Screen Status: Shows a live count in the Dynamic Island and the full session roster on the lock screen.
iCloud Pairing: Same Apple ID on Mac and iPhone auto-pairs devices — no new login and no QR code scanning.
LAN-First with Encrypted Relay: Uses the local network at your desk and falls back to an end-to-end-encrypted relay when remote, keeping code off port22 servers.

Approve Long-Running Agents on the Go: Kick off a Claude Code refactor and approve intermediate steps from your phone during commute or errands.
Monitor Overnight Runs: Watch an agent's live transcript from bed or a meeting without returning to the desk.
Cross-Room Development: Continue a coding session from the couch while the actual model, tools, and repo stay on the Mac.
Multi-Session Oversight: Track several parallel agent sessions from one phone view instead of tab-switching on the Mac.
Remote Debugging Assist: Read an agent's reasoning stream from a client site or coffee shop before deciding whether to intervene.

VIRENCORE

Free

A native macOS floating workspace that keeps AI conversations, project memory, files and live voice together on your Mac.

Floating Cube Workspace: Hover the cube to reveal the workspace and click to pin it, or move away to hide it while tasks keep running in the background.
Per-Conversation Model Routing: Each chat picks its own model and account — ChatGPT with Codex access, supported model APIs, or a local Ollama model.
Editable Project Memory: Notes, decisions and preferences stay attached to a project and carry into later conversations, and you can review, change or remove any of them.
Live Voice Control: Speak to open a project, steer a running task or send new work, and add a correction while the task is still going.
Detachable Companion Windows: Pull out and resize a browser, a file or a second conversation so reference material sits beside the work.
Explicit Mac Access: Codex can work with files and run commands only after you turn Mac access on; screen control additionally requires Codex Desktop's signed Computer Use helper.
Local Data Storage: Conversation history and saved memory live on your Mac, and cloud processing happens only when you choose a cloud model or voice.
Open Source Beta: The macOS installer and the Apache 2.0 source are both published, so the workspace can be inspected and built from source.

Long-Running Project Work: Keep a website or client project's decisions in project memory so each session resumes instead of re-explaining the brief.
Brief to Deliverable: Have the agent read a client brief and save a proposal document, then open it in a companion window next to the conversation.
Parallel Task Execution: Start several tasks across different models at once and check back on them without blocking the conversation you are in.
Hands-Free Steering: Dictate a correction or open a project by voice while your hands are busy elsewhere on the Mac.
Privacy-Sensitive Drafting: Run a local Ollama model so conversation content never leaves the machine.
Model Comparison: Put the same question to a Codex route and a local model in adjacent windows to compare the answers side by side.