Conductor vs Crush
A side-by-side comparison of Conductor and Crush, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.
Compared from listings verified as of
At a glance
| Attribute | Conductor | Crush |
|---|---|---|
| Category (differs) | Agent | IDE |
| Pricing (differs) | FREE | BYO KEY |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Deployment | Local | Local |
| Platforms (differs) | macOS | CLI, macOS, Linux, Windows |
| Model support | BYO key / model | BYO key / model |
| Vendor (differs) | Melty Labs | Charm |
| Capabilities (differs) |
|
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The honest brief
Conductor
A native Mac control plane that runs several coding agents at once, each sandboxed in its own git worktree so parallel work never collides.
- Runs many coding agents in parallel
- Each agent isolated in a git worktree
- Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor
- App is free; bring your own agent plan
- Real-time progress + easy merge review
- macOS (Apple Silicon) only
- Not open source
- Useful only with paid agent subscriptions
- Young, fast-changing product
Crush
Charm's signature TUI polish over a model-agnostic terminal agent: switch providers mid-session and keep code, keys, and data on your own machine.
- Polished, keyboard-driven terminal UI
- BYO keys for many providers
- LSP-aware code context
- Runs locally; you control keys and data
- Requires your own model API keys
- Beta — some features still missing
- FSL license is not OSI open-source yet
When to pick which
Pick Conductor if you need Code review and Multi-agent orchestration.
- Code review (secondary capability)
- Multi-agent orchestration (primary capability)
Pick Crush if you need Autonomous coding agent, Terminal / CLI agent, and Code generation.
- Autonomous coding agent (primary capability)
- Terminal / CLI agent (primary capability)
- Code generation (secondary capability)
They also differ on:
- Pricing
- FREE · BYO KEY
- Platforms
- macOS · CLI, macOS, Linux, Windows