Verdict: If you are juggling multiple AI coding agents — Claude Code here, Codex there, a couple of open-source CLIs in the wings — Orca is the cleanest free way to run them side-by-side without one agent overwriting another. It is a desktop app (macOS, Windows, Linux) backed by Y Combinator and shipped under the MIT license, with ~36,000 GitHub stars as of early August 2026. The mechanism that makes it work is parallel git worktrees: each agent gets its own isolated checkout, so you can fan one prompt out to five agents and pick the best result. It costs nothing if you already have a coding-agent subscription or you pair it with a free open-source agent and a free model tier.
Last verified: 2026-08-04 Volatile facts: Pricing, model tiers, and feature availability change often — this guide was last checked on the date above. TL;DR:
- Orca is a free, MIT-licensed desktop "Agent Development Environment" (ADE) — not an agent itself.
- It runs ~25 CLI coding agents side-by-side, each in its own isolated git worktree.
- Free path: install Orca + a no-cost agent (Hermes, OpenCode) + a free model provider. No Orca fee, no bolted-on markup.
- The standout features are parallel worktrees, the design-mode click-to-prompt browser, and a mobile companion that lets you steer agents from your phone.
- Compare it against alternatives (Conductor, cmux, herdr, AgentsRoom) before committing — the field is young and shipping fast.
What is Orca and what problem does it solve?
Orca is an Agent Development Environment (ADE) — a desktop application that orchestrates CLI-based coding agents (Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, OpenCode, Cursor CLI, Gemini, and 20+ others) rather than being a coding agent itself. The repo describes it as "the ADE for working with a fleet of parallel agents. Run any coding agent with your own subscription." (source: GitHub README, stablyai/orca).
The problem it solves is the one-tool-at-a-time trap. Most AI-assisted coding workflows still paste a prompt into one agent in one terminal, judge the output, and re-prompt when it's wrong. Orca turns that into a fan-out: the same prompt goes to N agents in parallel, each in its own git worktree, and you keep whichever one solves the problem best. That is meaningfully different from a typical "AI IDE" because Orca is not reselling model access — you bring your own agent subscriptions and it just routes them.
The project is built by Stably AI (founders Jinjing Liang, ex-Google Chrome engineer, and Neil Parker, ex-Uber tech lead), backed by Y Combinator (Winter 2022 batch), and lives at github.com/stablyai/orca.
How is Orca different from Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor?
Orca is not a replacement for those tools — it is the shell that runs them in parallel. The distinction matters because most "AI IDE" comparisons conflate the agent and the orchestrator.
| Capability | Orca | Single-agent IDEs (Cursor, Windsurf) | Plain terminal + agent CLI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runs many agents at once | ✅ Yes, ~25 CLI agents | ❌ Usually one agent per pane | Manual (you juggle tabs) |
| Each agent in its own git worktree | ✅ Built-in | ❌ (one workspace shared) | Manual git worktree add |
| Single free install, bring-your-own-subscription | ✅ MIT, no markup | Freemium, often resells model access | Agents are free; you wrangle them yourself |
| Mobile companion (iOS/Android) | ✅ Native apps | ❌ | ❌ |
| Click UI → send to agent ("design mode") | ✅ Chromium per worktree | Partial (Cursor Composer etc.) | ❌ |
| Remote agents over SSH | ✅ SSH worktrees with auto-reconnect | Some (Cursor's remote SSH) | Manual SSH tunnels |
Confirmed compatible agents (per the official README): Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor CLI, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Pi, Grok, Amp, OpenClaude, Antigravity, Hermes Agent, Devin, Goose, Auggie, Cline, Kimi, Kiro, Qwen Code, Rovo Dev, and "any CLI agent" more broadly (source: stablyai/orca README).
How much does Orca cost?
Orca itself is free and open source under the MIT license — there is no paid tier, no metered usage, and no model markup. You pay only for whatever coding agents you already subscribe to.
If you already have a Claude or Codex login, plug it in and you're done. If you do not, you can pair a free open-source agent with a free model tier:
- Open-source agents that work in Orca (no subscription): Hermes Agent, OpenCode, Cline, Aider, Goose.
- Free model tiers that pair with them: DeepSeek's free coding-tier API, Google AI Studio's free Gemini access, and local model runtimes like Ollama or LM Studio. We have separately walked through how to run OpenAI Codex CLI with free AI models in 2026 and how to run DeepSeek V4 Flash as a free coding agent — both setups slot straight into Orca as the orchestration layer.
That is the genuinely free path: install Orca, point it at a no-cost agent, point that agent at a no-cost model, and you have a parallel-fleet setup without paying Orca anything.
How do you install Orca? (Step-by-step)
Orca runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. The official download links come straight from the GitHub releases page.
1. Download the desktop app
Direct installers (latest release, pulled from github.com/stablyai/orca/releases/latest):
- macOS Apple Silicon:
orca-macos-arm64.dmg - macOS Intel:
orca-macos-x64.dmg - Windows:
orca-windows-setup.exe - Linux:
orca-linux.AppImage
Or via package manager:
# macOS (Homebrew)
brew install --cask stablyai/orca/orca
# Arch Linux (AUR)
yay -S stably-orca-bin
2. Open the app and pick a project
When Orca launches you get a "control room" view. You can open an existing folder, clone a project from a GitHub URL, or start a blank one. Whatever you pick, Orca treats it as the root the worktree machinery hangs off of.
3. Plug in your coding agent
Because Orca orchestrates rather than re-sells model access, the setup that actually matters is your own agent credentials. Most users have one of two paths:
- You already have Claude Code or Codex: your existing login flows through. Orca also surfaces per-account usage and rate-limit reset times in its UI, which is useful when you are running multiple agents and want to see who has budget left.
- You want the free path: install an open-source agent (
npm i -g opencode,pipx install hermes-agent, etc.), point it at a free model provider's API key, and Orca will pick it up as one of the agents you can launch.
4. Split panes or fan out to parallel worktrees
There are two ways to run more than one agent:
- Terminal splits — split a pane right or down and launch a second agent in the same workspace. Good for ad-hoc work where you are watching two agents tackle different sub-problems.
- Parallel worktrees — this is the headline feature. One prompt fans out to N agents, each in its own isolated git worktree; none of them see each other's changes. When they finish you compare diffs side-by-side and merge the winner. This is the workflow that the broader "agent orchestration" category has been converging on — Composio's Agent Orchestrator and the open-source cmux take the same git-worktree-per-agent shape, and Tembo's write-up of AI agent orchestration tools for coding in 2026 flags worktree isolation as the feature to look for in this whole category.
What are parallel worktrees and why do they matter?
A git worktree is a built-in Git feature that lets you check out multiple branches of the same repository into separate directories at the same time. Orca wraps that primitive: each agent you spawn gets its own worktree, runs in isolation, and produces its own diff.
The practical benefit is that agents cannot overwrite each other. If you ask five agents to refactor a module, every one of them works against a clean checkout. You then compare what each produced, keep the strongest, and discard the rest. That converts the "did the first prompt land?" gamble into a "which of these N attempts is best?" judgement call.
This pattern is precisely what we covered in our guide to running an AI agent operating system with remote orchestration — multi-agent setups live or die on whether they can isolate each agent's blast radius. Git worktrees are the simplest primitive that actually does that.
What is "design mode" and is it useful?
Design mode is Orca's click-to-prompt UI feature. It opens a real Chromium window for the current worktree — not a screenshot, an actual browser — and lets you click any element on the rendered page. When you click, Orca grabs that element's HTML, CSS, and a cropped screenshot and drops them into your agent's prompt. You can stack several clicks and annotated notes ("make this yellow", "tighten spacing here") and ship the whole batch at once.
This is meaningfully different from typing "change the thing near the top". The agent receives the exact element's selector plus a visual crop, which collapses the round-trip on visual tweaks. We have separately looked at how browser-side interaction is becoming a first-class agent capability — see our write-up on Microsoft Fara 1.5's vision-only browser automation model for the model-side counterpart — and Orca's design mode is the orchestrator-side version of the same idea.
One honest caveat: design mode only helps when the agent is working on something that renders in a browser. For backend, infra, or pure-code refactors it adds nothing.
Does Orca work from your phone?
Yes, via the official mobile companion apps. They pair with your desktop by scanning a code and surface live agent status, usage/reset info, and the ability to send a follow-up message to a running agent without being at your desk.
- iOS: App Store or TestFlight beta
- Android: APK on GitHub releases
The mobile companion is the part that genuinely differentiates Orca from the rest of the open-source orchestrator field — cmux, herdr, and Conductor are all terminal/desktop first. We have written before about accessing your AI agent dashboard from your phone with Tailscale, and Orca's mobile pairing is the same kind of "monitor and nudge long-running agents from anywhere" workflow built in.
What else ships in Orca?
A short tour of the rest of the feature list, all confirmed against the official README:
- Ghostty-class terminal — a WebGL-rendered terminal with infinite splits and scrollback that survives app restarts. Built on the same terminal tech as the popular Ghostty emulator.
- GitHub + Linear, native — browse PRs, issues, and project boards in-app; open a worktree from any Linear task; review and approve PRs without context switching.
- Annotate AI diffs — drop markdown comments on any diff line and ship them back to the agent as a batch. This is the review loop that the "agent generates code, human reviews" pattern has been missing.
- Drag-and-drop files into agent prompts — the editor is the VS Code editor (Monaco), so files and images drop straight into a prompt.
- SSH worktrees — run agents on a remote beefier machine with full file editing, git, terminals, port forwarding, auto-reconnect, and passphrase caching.
- Computer Use — an opt-in skill that lets an agent actually operate apps on your screen (real clicks, not virtual coordinate guesses) when a workflow needs genuine UI interaction.
- Orca CLI — agents can drive Orca itself:
orca worktree create,orca snapshot,orca click,orca fill. This is what lets you script orchestration workflows end-to-end. - Account switcher — hot-swap between Claude or Codex accounts without re-logging in. Useful if you cap out on one account's rate limit mid-fleet.
How does Orca compare against the alternatives?
The 2026 open-source "run multiple coding agents in parallel" field is crowded. Here is a like-for-like comparison built from primary sources (the projects' own repos and docs).
| Tool | License | Platforms | Worktree-per-agent | Mobile | Hook | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orca (repo) | MIT | macOS, Win, Linux + iOS/Android | ✅ | ✅ | Design mode, GitHub/Linear native | Parallel agent fleets with a polished GUI + mobile |
| cmux (repo) | OSS | CLI/TUI | ✅ | ❌ | Terminal-native multiplexer | Developers who live in the terminal |
| herdr (repo) | Apache-2.0 | CLI/TUI (Rust) | ✅ | ❌ | Third-party ecosystem (herdr-remote, reviewr) | Minimal, fast, scriptable parallel agents |
| Conductor (Melty Labs) | Free Mac app | macOS only | ✅ (Claude Code sessions) | ❌ | Polished Mac GUI | Mac users running multiple Claude Code sessions |
| Composio Agent Orchestrator (repo) | OSS | Cross-platform | ✅ | ❌ | Adds an autonomous orchestrator on top of fleets | Teams that want auto-CI-fixing + merge-conflict handling |
| vibe-kanban (repo) | OSS | Web UI | ✅ | ❌ | Kanban-style admin panel | Visual task-board control over agents |
How to pick:
- Want a polished cross-platform desktop app with mobile + design mode? → Orca.
- Want to stay in the terminal? → cmux or herdr.
- On a Mac and only running Claude Code? → Conductor.
- Want orchestration to handle CI failures and merge conflicts for you? → Composio Agent Orchestrator or a managed platform like Tembo.
- Visual Kanban over a fleet? → vibe-kanban.
The honest read: Orca is the only one in this set that combines open source, cross-platform desktop, mobile companion, and design mode in a single install. It is also the youngest of the serious contenders (first release March 2026) so expect breaking changes — pin a stable version if you build a workflow on top of it.
What are the gotchas before you commit to Orca?
A few honest limitations worth knowing about up front, all sourced from the project's own docs and community notes:
- It is early software with near-daily releases. The repo ships multiple release candidates a week. Treat the changelog as the real feature list and pin a version if you depend on a specific workflow.
- You still pay for the agents you run through it. Orca removes the orchestrator markup but does not remove your Claude/Codex/Gemini bill. Running a fleet of five agents in parallel multiplies your token spend, not just your throughput.
- Parallel worktrees consume disk and memory. Each worktree is a full checkout plus a running agent process; five-plus parallel agents add up on a small laptop. Use the SSH worktree feature to push heavy runs onto a bigger box.
- It is a developer tool, not a no-code one. Orca assumes you are comfortable with CLI agents, git worktrees, and editing config. If you want a no-code "AI agent team" path, our guide on building a no-code AI agent army for a one-person business in 2026 is the more honest starting point.
- Mobile is for monitoring and nudging, not authoring. The companion app is great for "is my agent done?" and "send a one-line follow-up", not for writing prompts from scratch.
What this means for you
If you are already running one coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode) and you are bottlenecked on serial execution — waiting on one run to finish before starting the next — Orca is the cheapest way to break that bottleneck without one agent clobbering another's changes. The free path is real: install Orca, add a no-cost agent, plug in a free model API, and you can have a parallel fleet running this afternoon without Orca charging you a cent. The features that actually change your workflow are parallel worktrees (best-of-N instead of best-of-one) and the mobile companion (steer fleets from your pocket); the rest is polish.
If you are a solo builder who has been hand-rolling multiple agent terminals, this is the tool that replaces that pile of tabs.
FAQ
Q: Is Orca really free? A: Yes. Orca is open source under the MIT license with no paid tier and no model markup. You pay only for the coding agents you run through it (Claude, Codex, etc.). If you pair it with a free open-source agent and a free model tier, your total spend on Orca itself is zero.
Q: Which AI coding agents work with Orca? A: Any CLI coding agent. The official README confirms Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor CLI, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Pi, Grok, Amp, OpenClaude, Antigravity, Hermes Agent, Devin, Goose, Auggie, Cline, Kimi, Kiro, Qwen Code, Rovo Dev, and "any CLI agent" more broadly.
Q: How do parallel worktrees prevent agents from overwriting each other? A: Each agent Orca spawns gets its own isolated git worktree — a separate directory checked out from the same repository. None of them can see or edit another's working copy. When they finish you compare diffs and merge whichever one wins, exactly like merging branches.
Q: Can I use Orca without a Claude or Codex subscription? A: Yes. Install a free open-source agent (Hermes Agent, OpenCode, Cline, Aider, or Goose) inside Orca, then point it at a free model tier (DeepSeek free coding API, Google AI Studio's free Gemini access, or a local model via Ollama/LM Studio). No Claude or Codex login required.
Q: Does Orca work on Windows and Linux, or only macOS?
A: All three. The desktop app ships installers for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows, and Linux (AppImage, plus Homebrew on macOS and yay on Arch). Mobile companion apps are separate — iOS on the App Store and TestFlight, Android via an APK on GitHub releases.
Q: How does Orca compare to Conductor, cmux, and herdr? A: Conductor is a polished Mac-only app focused on multiple Claude Code sessions. cmux and herdr are CLI/TUI terminal-native multiplexers with worktree isolation. Orca is the only one of the four that is cross-platform desktop + mobile + ships a visual design mode, and it supports a wider list of CLI agents. Conductor and Orca are both free; cmux and herdr are open source.
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