AQ vs Conductor: parallel coding agents, solo or as a team

Published July 10, 2026 · by the AQ team

Choose Conductor if you are one developer on a Mac who wants to run parallel Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor agents locally, for free. Choose AQ if you work on a team: AQ runs the same agent CLIs in cloud workspaces that teammates open together in a browser, with a shared live terminal, code editor, and app preview. The one-line difference: Conductor is a single-player Mac desktop app, AQ is a multiplayer web platform that runs on your own infrastructure.

The two products are built on the same core insight: git worktrees are the right isolation unit for running many coding agents in parallel on one repository. Where they diverge is everything around that insight: where the agents execute, who can see the work while it happens, and what a "workspace" means when more than one person cares about it.

AQ vs Conductor at a glance

What is Conductor?

Conductor (conductor.build) describes itself as a way to "run parallel Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor agents in isolated workspaces on your Mac." It is a native macOS desktop app: each workspace is a git worktree on your local disk, agents execute on your own machine, and you review and merge their changes from the app. As of July 2026 it is free, it is Mac only (Windows is a waitlist, and there is no Linux version), and it includes a Linear integration. Conductor came out of Y Combinator's S24 batch and has raised a $22M Series A, so it is well funded and actively developed.

For a solo developer on a Mac, that is a genuinely strong package: no infrastructure, no account for anyone else, your code never leaves your laptop, and the price is zero.

What is AQ?

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.

Like Conductor, every AQ workspace is an isolated git worktree. Unlike Conductor, that worktree lives on a VM you control (bring your own, or provision an AQ-managed dedicated VM (included with the paid plan) in a few clicks), and the agents inside it run as real CLIs in tmux, streamed live to the browser. Anyone the workspace is shared with opens the same URL and sees the same terminal scrollback, the same editor, and the same running preview. Agents authenticate with each user's own Claude, OpenAI, and GitHub sign-ins; AQ does not proxy or mark up model usage.

Where Conductor wins

• Price. Conductor is free as of July 2026. AQ is a paid team product.
• Zero setup. Download a Mac app and go. AQ needs a VM (yours or AQ-managed) before agents can run.
• Local execution. Your code stays on your machine, which some security postures prefer to any cloud VM, including one you own.
• Native app feel. A polished desktop app on a fast Mac is hard to beat for a single person's inner loop.

Where AQ wins

• Your whole team can use it today. AQ runs in the browser on macOS, Windows, Linux, and phones. Conductor's Windows version is a waitlist as of July 2026.
• Multiplayer. A teammate can open your workspace mid-run and watch the same live terminal, type into the session, or leave a pinned comment on the preview that goes straight to the agent as a prompt. On Conductor, "sharing" means pushing a branch and describing what happened.
• The work outlives your laptop. Agents run in tmux on a VM, so closing your lid, losing Wi-Fi, or switching devices does not kill a run. On Conductor, your Mac is the runtime.
• Shareable previews. Each workspace gets a live dev-server preview with a shareable link, including guest links for people outside the team. Design and product can review an agent's work without cloning anything.
• Team-level Linear intake. Any teammate labels an issue "ai-task" and a workspace appears in the shared sidebar, with ownership following the Linear assignee and status syncing both ways.
• More agents. Beyond Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor Agent, AQ runs Kimi, Grok, and plain shells side by side in the same workspace.

The deeper difference: an app on one Mac vs a place your team enters

Conductor and AQ answer different questions. Conductor answers "how do I, personally, run five agents at once without them stepping on each other?" AQ answers "how does my team run agents as a shared practice?" With AQ, the work is a place your team can enter, not a diff that arrives: an engineer can hand a half-finished workspace to a teammate by sending a link, a reviewer can inspect the actual running app rather than imagining it from a diff, and a manager can see every active workspace and its PRs in one sidebar. None of that has an equivalent when workspaces live on one person's Mac.

Pricing compared

Conductor is free as of July 2026. It is venture backed, so paid tiers may appear eventually, but today the price is zero and that is a real advantage for individuals. AQ costs $100 per user per month at promotional launch pricing (the standard price is $200), billed as a team plan with a 14-day trial; you also pay for the underlying compute, either your own VM or an AQ-managed dedicated one. Model usage on both products comes from your own Claude and OpenAI subscriptions; AQ never resells or marks up inference.

Bottom line

If you are a solo developer on a Mac, use Conductor: it is free, local, and purpose built for exactly that. If you are a team, if anyone works on Windows or Linux, or if you want agent runs that teammates can watch, join, and review live, use AQ. Some engineers do both: Conductor for personal scratch work, AQ for anything the team needs to see.