Xirp alternatives for Windows, Linux, and teams

Published August 31, 2026 · by the AQ team

Xirp (xirp.spotify.com) is Spotify's agentic development environment: a macOS desktop app that manages parallel coding agent sessions across Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI, one git worktree per task, with organizational context flowing in from Spotify Portal. It launched in public beta on August 10, 2026 after internal use by 1,300+ Spotify engineers across 36,000+ sessions, and it is genuinely good at its job. People search for alternatives for three reasons, all of them the shape of the product rather than bugs: as of August 2026 Xirp is macOS-only (Windows and Linux are waitlisted, not shipped), sessions execute on your Mac (persistent across app restarts, but still gone when the laptop is), and its team features assume Spotify Portal, a commercial internal developer platform, with no documented way for teammates to join a live session. The right alternative depends on which of those you are solving: Vibe Kanban and tmux-based setups reproduce the workflow on any OS, vendor cloud agents like Claude Code on the web and Codex move execution off your machine entirely, Conductor and cmux are the Mac-native neighbors, and AQ puts the whole pattern in the browser on a VM your team shares. Honest fit notes on each below.

What Xirp does well, and where it stops

Xirp's core is session management at fleet scale: 50+ parallel sessions, each a persistent terminal running Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini CLI in its own git worktree, so dozens of agents can work one codebase without collisions. Sessions survive closing and reopening the app (Xirp checks at startup for required software such as tmux and the GitHub CLI), a grid view puts multiple live terminals in one window, and working context is decoupled from any single agent, so a task started with one CLI can continue with another. Agents authenticate through their own native CLI configurations, so model usage bills to your existing accounts. The beta is a free macOS download (you create a Spotify Technology account in-app), and no pricing was published as of August 2026.

The distinctive part is Spotify Portal. Connected to Portal, sessions launched from a catalog entity start with organizational context (components, dependencies, ownership, architecture decisions), and transcripts can be uploaded back as shared knowledge. Xirp's own documentation is clear that Portal is optional: persistent sessions, local projects, worktrees, and the grid view all work without it. But that also locates the team story precisely: what the organization shares through Portal is knowledge about sessions, not the sessions themselves. As of August 2026 there is no documented way for a teammate to watch your running agent or type into it. If platform, persistence, or presence is your actual problem, here is the field.

Xirp alternatives at a glance

On Windows or Linux: Vibe Kanban and tmux

Xirp's waitlist for non-Mac platforms had no announced timeline as of August 2026, so Windows and Linux developers need a different answer today. The closest open-source match in spirit is Vibe Kanban: a free, Apache-2.0 orchestrator that runs as a local web app on any OS, gives each task an isolated git worktree, and drives Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor CLI, Amp, and others in parallel from a kanban board. Originally built by Bloop, it was handed to the community in April 2026: your code stays on your machine and agents bill to your own accounts. It is task-board-shaped rather than terminal-shaped; our Vibe Kanban alternatives guide covers its own tradeoffs.

The terminal-shaped answer is the one Xirp itself builds on: tmux. Plain tmux plus git worktrees reproduces the workflow in any terminal on any Unix system, including WSL on Windows: one window per task, one worktree per window, an agent CLI in each. You lose the grid view, but you gain something no desktop app offers: run the same setup on a server and your agents survive disconnects and lid closes. Open-source helpers like ccmux and workmux automate spawning agents into worktrees and showing status at a glance.

If the real problem is the laptop: move execution off your machine

Xirp's sessions are persistent in the useful local sense: close the app, reopen it, and the terminal is still going. What they do not survive is the machine itself sleeping in a bag. If you want agents that keep working after you leave, execution has to move off the laptop, and there are two routes.

The first is the vendor clouds. Claude Code on the web runs sessions in isolated VMs managed by Anthropic, in parallel, against your GitHub repository; as of August 2026 it is available on Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, and Anthropic opened a public beta of self-hosted environments (execution on servers you control) for Team and Enterprise plans on August 6, 2026. Codex takes the same shape on OpenAI's side: cloud tasks in isolated sandboxes preloaded with your repository, several running at once, bundled with paid ChatGPT plans. The trade against Xirp is vendor breadth and the live terminal: each cloud runs its own agent from a task queue, where Xirp's premise is many agents, one place, with a terminal you can type into. The cloud coding agents roundup compares these in depth, and background agents vs cloud agents untangles the vocabulary.

The second route keeps the live-terminal, many-agents premise and moves it to a machine you control: agent CLIs in tmux on a cloud VM, attached from anywhere. That is the pattern running Claude Code on a cloud VM walks end to end, and the foundation AQ productizes below.

Staying on the Mac: Conductor and cmux

If macOS is not the constraint and you want a different take on the same desktop pattern, two established neighbors are worth knowing. Conductor orchestrates parallel Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor agents in isolated worktrees with built-in review and merge flows; as of August 2026 it is free for local use, with a $50/month Pro tier adding cloud workspaces, a mobile app, and an API, and a Teams tier at $60 per user per month. cmux is a free, open-source native terminal built for parallel agents: vertical tabs with git status per workspace, notification rings, split panes, an embedded browser. Both are macOS-only, so the platform constraint does not improve; our Conductor alternatives and cmux alternatives guides cover each in depth.

Where AQ fits: the multiplayer, browser-based take

AQ is the multiplayer coding harness 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.

Against Xirp's three limits, AQ's answers are direct. Platform: AQ runs in the browser on macOS, Windows, Linux, and mobile, today. Persistence: agents run as real CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Kimi, Grok, or plain shells) in persistent tmux sessions on your team's VM (one you connect from your own cloud, or a dedicated always-on AQ-managed VM), streamed live to the browser, so sessions survive a closed laptop and resume from any device. Team: teammates open the same workspace and watch the same live session; typing into someone else's terminal is delegated by its owner approving a control request in one click, and workspaces are team-visible or private and shared with specific people, at the owner's choice. The worktree mechanics are the same idea Xirp uses, built in: each workspace gets an isolated git worktree (branch ai/{id}-{slug}, automatic dependency install, one-click rebase onto main), agents commit and open PRs with per-user GitHub auth, and each workspace can run a live dev-server preview with shareable links that work without an account for viewing. Work can also arrive from Linear: label an issue ai-task and a workspace appears, with status syncing both ways. Like Xirp, AQ does not resell inference: you log into each CLI with your own accounts, and AQ never marks up model usage.

The honest trade: AQ has no equivalent of Portal's service catalog. An AQ workspace's context is the repository, branch, and worktree the agent works in, plus whatever context files your repo carries; if your company already runs Portal and the catalog context is the draw, Xirp's integration is genuinely differentiated, and the full head-to-head is at AQ vs Xirp. Pricing is two plans, both public: Free is a personal sandbox for one person (AQ creates a private machine in an isolated network, nothing to install, no time limit), and Team is $50 per user per month early access (standard $200, billed monthly), covering VMs you connect from your own cloud or a dedicated AQ-managed VM, with the rate locked for your first 12 months. There is no shared multi-tenant execution tier.

How to choose

On a Mac, happy with local execution, and either on Spotify Portal or fine without org context: stay on Xirp, it is free in beta and built from real internal use. On Windows or Linux today: Vibe Kanban for the orchestrator shape, tmux plus worktrees for the terminal shape. Sessions that must survive the laptop: a vendor cloud agent if the vendor's sandbox suits you, or the cloud VM pattern if you want your own box and a real terminal. A different Mac-native take: Conductor or cmux. And if the goal is your team running many agents in one place, watching and steering the same live sessions from any OS, that is the case AQ was built for; the Free sandbox is the no-cost way to test whether the multiplayer claim holds up.