Bro vs Orca.

The short version.

Pick Orca if your day is git: a worktree for every task, diffs you send back to the agent, pull requests and tickets in the sidebar. Pick Bro if your day is the agents: which model they run on, which login they burn, and a crew that keeps going.

What each one is.

Orca and Bro agree on more than they differ on. Both run the agents' own terminals side by side, both keep an eye on who needs you, both reach your phone, and both are free and MIT licensed. The difference is what each one puts in the middle.

Row by row.

The same questions for both tools. A filled dot is a yes, a half dot is partly, a dashed one is a no. You'll see Orca ahead in more places than in any other comparison we've made, and we've left every one of those in. Flip the switch to hide the rows where you'd get the same answer from either.

Managed login. Sign in once.

This is the one place Orca comes close, and it's the fairest test of the two. Both tools know that serious agent use means several logins and a meter you can't ignore. They differ on who does the work.

Bro does it. 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 then run on any login you choose, the sidebar shows the 5-hour and weekly limits left on each, and in proxy mode a login at its limit hands its work to the next before the agent has seen an error.

How Orca handles it

Orca has real account management. It supports several Claude and Codex accounts (and OpenCode, Devin, Antigravity and GLM ones), keeps each in an isolated home and swaps the active one in one click. A status-bar widget tracks usage and warns you at 80 percent of a limit, for more than ten providers.

Three things stay manual. The sign-in itself still runs through the agent's own login, with Orca offering a sign-in link to copy. One account is active at a time for the whole app, and sessions already running keep their old account until you restart them. And there's no automatic failover: it's an open feature request, and a maintainer's latest word on it was that they'll "look into how to reliably do the automated switching."

Using several accounts is your call either way. Use ones you own, and read each provider's terms first.

Many projects at once.

Orca is the strongest of the four here, and its sidebar is built for it. Worktrees are grouped by project by default, you can filter by host and project, pin a worktree to the top of its project, and import a parent folder that holds several repos as one project group. A Cmd J jump palette reaches any worktree, chat or tab, unread worktrees go bold, a bell counts what's waiting, and an Agent Dashboard (still experimental) sorts agents into Needs you, Working, Done and Idle.

Bro groups sessions by project too, the git root or the folder when there's no repo, with live counts and the state rolled up to each project's row. Alt A jumps to whoever needs you, Alt Shift T tiles everything at once, and the phone app groups its chat list the same way. Its sidebar is simpler than Orca's. What it adds is coordination: each project can have its own orchestrator, a root orchestrator above them opens or reuses those and takes your voice, your phone and your schedule ("open a session in justgains"), and by default Claude sessions can only find and message sessions in their own project.

Orca's gaps are structural. It runs in one window, and multiple windows is an open request with 50 reactions. Workspaces that span repos and cross-repo diffs are among its most-requested open features. Its docs describe no coordinator for each project, and nothing that scopes an agent to its own project.

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

Bro is one workspace that opens two ways. The desktop app draws the terminals on the GPU. bro-cli draws the same workspace in your terminal, with the same sessions, sidebar, launcher, views and keys. Over SSH, in tmux or on a machine with no display, plain bro opens the terminal version by itself, and bro --view opens more windows on whatever is already running. Only a few things need a window, such as focus mode and the media panel.

Orca is a desktop app. Its orca command scripts the running app, orca serve runs it without a window for a browser or the phone app, and SSH worktrees run agents on another machine, with Orca installing its own server there. That covers a lot, but there's no terminal UI, so a box you only reach over SSH is driven from a window somewhere else.

Any model in any agent.

Orca is explicit that it isn't a model and doesn't sit in the middle: its enterprise page says "Orca never sits in the middle." That keeps it simple, and it means the model an agent uses is whatever that agent is configured for. Its docs show the by-hand route: edit an agent's launch command or environment, or change ~/.claude/settings.json, then launch it from the picker.

Bro sits in the middle on purpose. Its proxy translates between the Anthropic Messages, OpenAI Chat, OpenAI Responses and Gemini APIs live, so the agent you like can run on the model you want: Claude Code on GPT, Gemini, Kimi, DeepSeek or Grok, and Codex, Pi and omp on Claude, with tools, images and thinking intact. 16 providers are in the catalogue, OpenRouter adds 463 live models, and Ollama and LM Studio cover local ones.

Native, not Electron.

Orca is an Electron app with an xterm.js terminal. That gives it a huge amount of reach and an easy path to features like an embedded Chromium browser. It also has a weight you can see in the downloads: 197 MB for the Windows installer and 263 MB for the Apple silicon Mac one. Its own troubleshooting page advises closing worktrees you aren't using, "Each worktree keeps file watchers alive", and warns that split layouts with many browser tabs are the biggest RAM users.

Bro is written in Rust, with its terminals drawn on the GPU. Its Windows installer is 19 MB and the Apple silicon DMG is 25 MB. We haven't measured memory use, and we couldn't find anyone who has measured Orca's, so we'll stick to what's checkable: the size of the thing you download.

A crew that keeps working.

Orca is drivable. Its orca CLI lets any shell or agent create worktrees, send to terminals, wait for an agent to go idle and drive the browser, there are skills that teach agents to use it, and Automations run a prompt hourly, daily, weekly or on a cron or RRULE schedule. Behind a flag, in Experimental settings, there's a structured orchestration layer with runs, dependent tasks, supervised workers, an inbox and decision gates.

Bro's orchestrator is a session that runs the others. It opens sessions, hands out tasks, waits and reports back, on a schedule (in 10m, daily 09:00) or by voice. 26 MCP tools back it, callable from any shell as bro ctl. Watchdogs add a part we couldn't find in Orca's docs: when an agent goes idle, a fresh reviewer reads the chat and the code, checks your milestones and sends the next task.

The phone.

Orca has the lead here, and says it's in beta. Orca Mobile is on the App Store, rated 4.7 from 58 ratings, with Android as an APK download. It lists every worktree and agent, lets you read scrollback and reply, dictate, stage and commit, create a workspace and switch accounts, and sends push notifications. It pairs through Orca's relay, which needs an Orca sign-in, or directly over your network or Tailscale.

Bro's phone app pairs the direct way, over your network or Tailscale, and lists every session like a chat. The terminal is a tap away, dictation runs on the phone, and tapping a file path opens the file at the line. It isn't on the stores yet. Orca's docs note that closing the desktop app drops a direct connection until you reopen it, unless the phone pairs to a headless orca serve host. Bro can keep the phone bridge, the proxy and the watchdogs running in the background after you close its window.

Where Orca is far ahead.

Read this part twice. For a lot of people it will settle the question.

• It's worktree-native. Every task gets its own on-disk copy of the repo, with start-from pickers, nesting, archive and cleanup tools. Bro has none of it.
• The review loop is inside the app. Combined diffs, three-way conflict resolution, line comments you send back to the agent as one batch, AI-drafted commits and PR text, and a "fix broken checks" button. On GitHub that extends to checks, merge queues and stacked PRs, and GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps and Gitea are supported with less depth.
• It works from your tickets. GitHub issues, GitLab issues, Linear and Jira, with a worktree opening from any task.
• A real browser, and an editor. A Chromium window per worktree with devtools and a design mode that drops a clicked element, with its DOM and styles, into the agent's context. Plus a Monaco editor, a file explorer and viewers for Markdown, PDFs, notebooks and more.
• Breadth. Forty agents documented, SSH worktrees, remote servers, cloud VM recipes, computer use for native apps (beta), plugins (alpha) and eleven interface languages.
• Scale. About 111,000 stars, 468 contributors and 375 stable releases in seven months. Bro is a fraction of that.

One caution: parallel agents multiply quota, and Orca's own defaults pass each agent's permission-bypass flag on new launches, with a setting to switch to manual. Both are worth knowing before you spin up five worktrees.

Which one, then?

Match the line that sounds like your week.

They also work side by side. Both launch the agent CLIs you already have, so there's nothing to migrate in either direction.

Questions people ask.