AQ vs Xirp: two takes on the agentic development environment

Published August 11, 2026 · by the AQ team

Choose AQ if you want your team working with coding agents together, live: shared terminals teammates can watch and steer in a browser, running on a VM you control on the Team plan, or in a free personal sandbox to start. Choose Xirp if you are a macOS shop invested in Spotify's Portal platform and want agent sessions initialized with your service catalog's organizational context. The one-line difference: both products run many coding agents in parallel worktrees, but AQ is a browser-based platform built around live team collaboration, while Xirp is a macOS desktop app in beta whose organizational features come from connecting to Spotify Portal.

Xirp launched in public beta on August 10, 2026, and this page was written the following day; expect their product to move quickly. All claims about Xirp below are as of August 2026, from its public site, documentation, and launch blog.

AQ vs Xirp at a glance

What is Xirp?

Xirp (xirp.spotify.com) is Spotify's take on the agentic development environment, opened to the public in beta on August 10, 2026 after internal use by Spotify's own engineers. The launch blog reports thousands of Spotify engineers and 36,000+ sessions before the public release. It is a macOS desktop app that manages parallel coding agent sessions across Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini, giving each task its own git worktree so 50+ sessions can work the same codebase without collisions. Sessions are persistent within the app, and Xirp's design decouples working context from any single agent, so a task started with one CLI can continue with another.

The distinctive part is the connection to Spotify Portal, Spotify's commercial internal developer platform built on Backstage. Connected to Portal, sessions launched from a Software Catalog entity or a Portal Workspace initialize with organizational context (component architecture, dependency graphs, ownership, architecture decisions), and session transcripts can be uploaded back, building a shared knowledge base. Portal also hosts a marketplace of skills, rules, plugins, and MCP configurations. Portal is sold sales-led and through the AWS Marketplace; Xirp itself is a free macOS download in beta that has you create a Spotify Technology account in-app, and it had no published pricing at launch.

What is AQ?

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.

Every AQ workspace is an isolated git worktree on a machine dedicated to you: on the Team plan a VM you connect from your own cloud or an AQ-managed dedicated VM, on the Free plan a private sandbox machine AQ creates for you. The agents inside it are the real CLIs your engineers already subscribe to (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Kimi, Grok, Antigravity CLI, or plain shells), running in persistent tmux sessions streamed live to the browser. Sessions survive a closed laptop and resume from any device, including a phone. Teammates open the same workspace and see the same live terminal, editor, and running app preview; the session owner can delegate terminal input to a teammate in one click and keeps their own input. Previews get shareable links that work without an account for viewing, and comments pinned on a preview can be sent to the agent as prompts. Work arrives by hand, from a prompt, or from Linear: label an issue "ai-task" and a workspace appears in the team sidebar with status syncing both ways. Each engineer signs into the CLIs with their own accounts, and AQ never marks up model usage.

Where Xirp stands out

• Organizational context from Portal. If your company runs Spotify Portal, Xirp sessions start with your service catalog's components, dependencies, ownership, and architecture decisions: deep, structured context arriving with every session.
• Institutional memory. Session transcripts can be uploaded to Portal Workspaces, so what one engineer's agent learned is visible to the organization, and a marketplace consolidates team-built skills, rules, and MCP configurations.
• Proven at internal scale. Spotify's launch blog reports thousands of its own engineers and 36,000+ internal sessions before the public beta opened.
• Model routing. Xirp describes routing jobs to the best available price-performance, including internally-hosted open-source models, which matters to organizations running their own inference.

Where AQ wins

• Presence, not only knowledge flow. Xirp's documented team story is Portal context in and uploaded transcripts out; what it does not document is teammates in the session itself. On AQ they are: watching the same terminal in real time, steering the same agent, commenting on the same running preview, taking delegated input in one click. When an agent goes sideways, your teammate is in the session with you, not reading about it later.
• Any device, any OS, today. AQ runs in the browser on macOS, Windows, Linux, and mobile. Xirp is a macOS-only desktop app as of August 2026, with other platforms waitlisted.
• Execution on machines dedicated to you. On the Team plan, agents run on VMs you connect from your own cloud or on a dedicated always-on AQ-managed VM; the Free plan is a private sandbox machine AQ creates for one person. There is no shared multi-tenant execution tier, and sessions survive laptop closes because they never depended on your laptop. If a security review asks where code lives while agents work on it, AQ's answer is "on a machine you chose."
• Public pricing, no platform migration. AQ's plans and prices are public, and the Free plan is a personal sandbox with no time limit. Xirp published no pricing at its launch, and its organizational features assume Portal, which is sold to enterprises sales-led.
• More agents. AQ runs Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Kimi, Grok, Antigravity CLI, and plain shells; Xirp lists Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini as of August 2026. Both authenticate agents through their native CLIs with your own subscriptions.
• Sharing that crosses team lines. Preview links viewable without an account, review links for outside stakeholders, and Linear-native intake where ownership follows the assignee. Design and product can review an agent's work from a link with no seat and no checkout.

The deeper difference: memory of the work vs presence in the work

Xirp and AQ agree on the thesis this category now takes as given: one coding agent is a workflow, and a team's worth of them is an organizational problem. Xirp's answer to that problem is knowledge infrastructure: start sessions from the org's catalog context, collect uploaded transcripts, and make the organization smarter over time. It is the internal-developer-platform worldview applied to agents, and it assumes the platform (Portal) at the center. As of August 2026, Xirp's public docs describe context and transcripts shared through Portal; they do not document teammates joining the same live session. AQ's answer is presence: put the team inside the same live session, on machines dedicated to the team, so review, help, and handoff happen while the work is happening. It assumes no platform migration at all: your CLIs, your subscriptions, your issue tracker, and, on the Team plan, your own cloud. Teams that want an organizational memory layer and already own Portal will find Xirp's integration compelling. Teams that want to work with agents together, today, from any device, without adopting an IDP, are AQ's side of the line.

Pricing compared

Xirp had no published pricing at its August 2026 launch: the beta is a free macOS download, and the site promotes a free trial of Portal, which is sold to enterprises sales-led and through the AWS Marketplace. AQ's pricing is public: a Free plan (a personal sandbox machine AQ creates for you, no time limit) and a Team plan at $50 per user per month early access (standard $200, billed monthly, rate locked for your first 12 months) that covers VMs you connect from your own cloud or a dedicated always-on AQ-managed VM. On both products, mainstream agent CLIs bill through your own Claude and OpenAI accounts; AQ never marks up model usage.

Bottom line

Spotify entering this category says a lot about where engineering organizations are heading, and Xirp's Portal-powered organizational context is a genuinely differentiated idea for companies already on that platform. But as of August 2026 it is a macOS-only beta, and its documented team features are context and transcript sharing through Portal, not teammates inside the same live session. AQ ships that other half of the vision today: the whole team in the same live agent session, in a browser on any device, executing on machines dedicated to you, with public pricing and a free plan. If the question is "how should my team work with coding agents together, right now," that is AQ's home turf.