Conductor alternatives for Windows, Linux, and teams

Published July 10, 2026 · by the AQ team

Conductor is a free Mac desktop app that runs parallel Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor agents in isolated workspaces on your Mac, and it is genuinely good at that job. People look for alternatives for structural reasons: as of July 2026 it is Mac-only (Windows is a waitlist), it is single-player, and everything runs on your own machine. If you are on Windows or Linux today, the practical alternatives are AQ (browser-based, so it works from any OS), vibe-kanban (open source, local web UI), and OpenHands (open source, cloud or self-hosted). If the goal is teamwork rather than platform support, AQ, GitHub Copilot Agent HQ, and Warp Oz are the team-oriented options. Honest fit notes on all six below.

What Conductor does well, and where it stops

Credit first: Conductor (conductor.build) is free, polished, YC-backed with a $22M Series A, and it has a Linear integration. For a solo developer on a Mac who wants several agents working in parallel worktrees, it is one of the best answers available, and its funding makes it a safer bet than most free tools in this fast-consolidating category (Crystal was deprecated in February 2026; Bloop, behind vibe-kanban, shut down in April 2026).

The gaps are not bugs, they are the shape of the product. It is a native Mac app, so Windows and Linux developers are out until the waitlist converts into a release. It is single-player: there is no way for a teammate to open your workspace, watch the agent, or take over. And execution is local: agents run only while your Mac is on, they compete with your machine for resources, and nothing survives your laptop closing. If any of those three is your actual problem, here is the honest field.

Conductor alternatives at a glance

1. AQ: the same idea, in a browser, for a team

AQ is the multiplayer workspace where engineering teams run AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex together: shared live terminals, a code editor, and app previews, in your own cloud.

AQ solves all three Conductor constraints at once. Platform: it runs in the browser, so macOS, Windows, and Linux are equally first-class. Collaboration: workspaces are multiplayer, meaning a teammate opens the same workspace and sees the same live terminal, editor, and dev-server preview; you can share a private workspace with specific people, and guest preview links let outsiders see a running app. Execution: agents run as real CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Kimi, Grok, plain shells) in tmux on a VM you own or an AQ-managed VM (included with the paid plan), so work continues when your laptop sleeps. Each workspace is an isolated git worktree, like Conductor's workspaces. It shares Conductor's Linear affinity and goes further: label an issue "ai-task" and a workspace appears, with status syncing back. Per-user CLI logins mean AQ does not proxy or mark up your model usage.

Honest fit: the direct answer for Windows and Linux developers and for teams. The trade is that it is a paid product with a 14-day trial, where Conductor is free.

2. vibe-kanban: free and cross-platform, if you accept community maintenance

vibe-kanban is an open source kanban board for orchestrating coding CLIs from a local web UI, so it is not tied to macOS. It is free and has a large community (roughly 27,000 GitHub stars). The caveat: Bloop, the company behind it, shut down in April 2026, and the project is community-maintained now, with slower releases and no commercial support. Honest fit: the free cross-platform pick for a solo developer who is comfortable with that risk profile.

3. OpenHands: open source with a real deployment story

OpenHands (openhands.dev) is an open source platform for cloud coding agents: hosted cloud, self-hosted, or an enterprise Kubernetes runtime. Honest fit: the pick when the requirement is open source plus something an infrastructure team can actually operate. Unlike Conductor, it runs its own agent against your model keys rather than the CLIs you already subscribe to.

4. Cursor cloud agents: cross-platform via the editor you may already use

Cursor runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and its plans bundle cloud agents that execute on dedicated VMs in Cursor's cloud. Honest fit: if your team already pays for Cursor, this is the shortest path to parallel background agents on any OS. You get Cursor's agent in Cursor's cloud, not a choice of CLIs on your own infrastructure.

5. GitHub Copilot Agent HQ: agents where your code already lives

Agent HQ brings multi-vendor agents into Copilot with a mission control view, driven from GitHub issues and pull requests. Honest fit: the most team-legible option for organizations standardized on GitHub, and it works from any OS because it lives in GitHub. It is a delegation surface, not a live parallel-workspace environment like Conductor.

6. Warp Oz: managed agent fleets for teams

Warp Oz (warp.dev/oz) is an orchestration platform for fleets of cloud agents, built with teams in mind. Honest fit: worth a look if you want a managed, team-oriented take on running many agents at once and are comfortable with execution in Warp's cloud.

How to choose

On Windows or Linux and want Conductor's experience today: AQ if you want it in the browser with a team, vibe-kanban if you want free and local. Need teammates in the same session, watching the same agent: AQ is the only option on this list built around that. Want open source: vibe-kanban for a local board, OpenHands for a platform. Already paying Cursor or GitHub: their bundled agents are the path of least resistance. And if you are a solo Mac developer with none of these constraints, the honest advice is that Conductor remains a strong default; join its Windows waitlist only if you can afford to wait.