Bro vs Herdr vs T3 Code vs Orca.

The short answer.

There's no single best one, because each is built around a different center: Orca around git, T3 Code around one clean window for every agent, Herdr around the terminal itself, and Bro around the agents' models, logins and crew.

So match the line that sounds like your week. We make Bro, which is why we've shown the others' strengths as carefully as our own.

Four tools, four centers.

All four run your own agent subscriptions, all four are free and open source, and all four keep an eye on which agent needs you. What they put in the middle is what separates them. Each card links to the full head-to-head.

All four, row by row.

39 things people choose on. A filled dot is a yes, a half dot is partly, a dashed one is a no. On a phone, each row becomes a small card. Flip the switch to hide every row where all four answer the same.

Managed login: who signs you in?

Every serious agent setup ends up with several logins, and a meter you can't ignore. This is where the four differ most, so here's that slice on its own.

Bro manages them. Add a login from the launcher and Bro runs the sign-in, keeps it in a profile of its own and flags one that needs attention before a session finds out. Any session can run on any login, the sidebar shows what's left on each, and in proxy mode a login at its limit hands its work to the next before the agent sees an error.

Orca comes closest: several accounts, one-click swaps and usage meters, though the sign-in still runs through each agent and there's no failover yet. T3 Code signs you in for ChatGPT, Cursor and Antigravity and keeps an instance per account, but says a bigger pool belongs outside the app. Herdr leaves login to each agent on purpose. Pooling is your call in any of them: use logins you own, and read each provider's terms first.

Many projects at once.

All four can show a lot of projects. Orca's sidebar is the most developed, with worktrees grouped by project, filters, pins and a jump palette. Herdr gives you spaces with their agents ranked by who's waiting, and T3 Code lists threads from every project, with grouping by project still a beta setting.

Bro groups by project too. What it adds is coordination: an orchestrator for each project and one above them all, agents that by default can only message sessions in their own project, and the same view on your phone, in a terminal and in a window. Here's that slice of the chart on its own.

A terminal UI and a desktop app, for every use case.

Bro is the only one of the four where the terminal UI and the desktop app are one workspace. Herdr has both, as separate programs that don't share agents. T3 Code and Orca are windows, with a server mode and a browser or a phone to look at it, and no terminal UI.

With Bro you open the app at your desk, SSH into a server and get the terminal version without asking, add another window on the same sessions with bro --view, pair a phone, or drive it all from a shell with bro ctl. Only a few things need a window, such as focus mode and the media panel.

Any model in any agent.

The other three run each agent on whatever model that agent is set to use. Pointing an agent elsewhere is done by hand, with environment variables and a custom endpoint, and T3 Code's FAQ says plainly that local models aren't supported. Bro puts a translating proxy in the middle. It speaks the Anthropic Messages, OpenAI Chat, OpenAI Responses and Gemini APIs, so Claude Code can run on GPT, Gemini, Kimi, DeepSeek or Grok, Codex, Pi and omp can run on Claude, and Ollama and LM Studio cover your own machine. The catalogue holds 16 providers, with 463 more through OpenRouter.

What you download.

Two of the four are native Rust apps, and two are Electron. The difference shows in the size of the Windows download, and it's the one weight number we could verify for all four.

How we compared.

We make Bro, so you should know how this was done. On October 30, 2026 we read each project's own site, README, docs, changelog and issue tracker, and Bro's docs and its 2.1.20 release. This is a docs-and-source comparison, not a benchmark: we didn't install or run the other three for it. Every cell in the chart is something we could point at in a source. When we looked and found nothing, the cell says "not in its docs", which isn't proof that something doesn't exist.

Herdr counts as two products, a new native app and the original terminal app, and the chart says which when they differ. All four ship constantly, so if a row is out of date, tell us at [email protected].

Questions people ask.