Skipper and Conductor
Both apps run several coding agents at once on a Mac, each with a separate copy of your code. Conductor uses a chat view and offers cloud workspaces. Skipper uses the agents’ own terminals and lets you switch accounts.
At a glance
Facts about Conductor are as of September 2026, from conductor.build, its documentation, and its pricing page.
| What matters | Skipper | Conductor |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free in private beta | Free for local workspaces, Pro $50 a month, Teams $60 per user a month |
| Works on | macOS 26.5 or later | macOS |
| Agents | Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode, plus Pi and Antigravity when installed | Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode, plus Cursor with a Cursor API key |
| How you talk to the agent | The vendor's own terminal interface, in Ghostty | A chat interface, with an experimental Big Terminal Mode that runs CLI agents in a terminal |
| Separate copy of your code | A separate git worktree and branch for each session | A git worktree and branch per workspace |
| Accounts | Several Claude and Codex accounts per agent, with plan usage, chosen per session | Your own subscriptions and API keys |
| Cloud workspaces | None, everything runs on your Mac | Conductor Cloud on the Pro plan, with multiplayer and an API |
Code review and setup details
| What matters | Skipper | Conductor |
|---|---|---|
| Setup scripts | setup and other scripts in skipper.json | setup, run, and archive scripts in .conductor/settings.toml |
| Diff review | Your own diff tool, opened with ⇧⌘O | A built-in diff viewer with line comments sent to the agent |
| Pull requests | Status, checks, merge, merge queue, auto-merge, and stacks | Create, check, and merge pull requests, and stacks |
| GitHub | Optional | Required, through gh auth |
When to choose Skipper
You want to see Claude Code and Codex as they are, with their own prompts, slash commands, and approval screens, rather than a chat translation of them. You have more than one Claude or ChatGPT plan and want to choose the account per session and see each plan's usage before you start. You want everything to run on your Mac, and you want an app built in Swift with a Rust core.
What Conductor offers
Conductor includes a diff viewer with line comments you can send to the agent. Its cloud workspaces keep running after a laptop closes and support several people in one workspace. It also offers an API for starting agents and supports Cursor’s agent. Its Enterprise plan lists a SOC 2 Type II report, SAML SSO, and SCIM.
Try both on the same repository
Both apps work with ordinary git worktrees, so you can point them at the same repository and compare them on a real task. Start the same prompt in each, then compare the branches.