Herdr has been another YC favorite https://herdr.dev/
Orca has a lot of UI bugs, buttons that don't work, menus that don't disappear, etc.. To be fair they push updates quite regularly, but I think I will check back in once it's a bit more stable.
We test our product like crazy, so I'm quite surprised to hear this. But feel free to drop me a message, open a GH issue or otherwise.
We are OSS MIT and always open to feedback
gh: https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit
It's a bit unique from a design standpoint, but the next release brings it a little more in line with the zeitgeist (but not too much).
Wednesday, Nov 4 New users can no longer sign up for Conductor or download the app.
Friday, Nov 13 Conductor Cloud goes read-only
Local Conductor will continue working as normal for now. It will start winding down in early 2027.
I wonder what would be the way to protect OSS like this from this kind of end?
It's a great win for the team, but many will be looking into other solutions for a while.
I started using Conductor in January this year and it was a great tool - Charlie and the team knocked it out of the park. I only migrated to Orca when I needed better multi-machine control, and remote control, but these tools are a dime-a-dozen now. I'm not sure that if I was hunting for a new tool today that I'd pick up Orca. Maybe Herdr? or Stencil's Tern?
All that to say - they built a great product with great UX. Looking forward to seeing what they build next at Meta!
They ruin innovation top down and bottom up at the same time
I built it for myself as a dev who loves tmux and vim and who was very unsatisfied with the typical agent orchestration experience. You should check it out! The biggest advantage is you bring your coding agents to woltspace, not the other way around.
And today we're doing a refund + moving the org to t3.codes instead.
Boo Meta. Boooooooo.
You might want to do a quick eval of all the products in the space vs your org's needs! There are a lot of options now, and T3 isn't really a drop-in replacement for Conductor if you wanted the cloud setup.
Specifically T3's great for local, but for cloud they don't host anything - you just run their server on your own machine / VM. Which works ok, esp if you prefer full self-hosted, but then parallel agents still share a machine and need worktrees for isolation. Conductor Cloud actually eliminated worktrees by giving each workspace its own VM with a dev environment preloaded - which is the same approach we (and a few others) are taking.
Also - if you are a developer/SWE this 'keep your laptop closed' thing with these control planes is mostly hype. I'd place my bets on something like Rex (https://www.superlogical.com/) instead.
I'll prolly have claude reverse engineer conductor over the next month so the show can go on ...
For cloud agents I just built plugins in bb for boat.dev and smolmachines.com. Works like a charm.
95% of all my sessions are on boxes. Initially, the draw was just a remote box that I could control on mobile, but some of the features they have added recently, like coordinating child sessions, are wildly good.
I know there are new startups in this space every day, so what tipped things for me was that the team is so responsive and ships features in the matter of hours.
-----
Edit:
Surprise, surprise - I'm launching a new open source project: "Conducted" (not affiliated with, or to be confused with any similar brands) Conducted is MIT license, and will remain open source until hell has frozen over.
Looking for contributors ;) .. Feel free to give it a star, throw some agents in its direction.
The whole team is around to help answer any questions. You can reach out to me personally at charlie [at] melty.sh.
Hopefully Meta does something good with your team's talent and technology, but regardless, it was a huge productivity boost for me and I really appreciate that. Good luck to you and your team at Meta!
This made me laugh. The world is different now. Congrats!
Congratulations, getting an exit in a bit over a year is very very good
Consider Open Sourcing the core/app
Anyway, for anyone reading, just a not developer-led products. How do they do it?!
(I am building my own tool in this area and I literally downloaded and tried all of them as market research)
Disclaimer: I'm developing it.
- paseo: open, mobile app is a first class citizen, i've been happy with it
- orca: vc backed, featureful (built in ios sim, for example)
- herdr: vc backed, terminal native, im sure there are more features since i last checked it
- t3: open, never used it but folks seem to like it
I work on Orca and we're shipping frequently.
Let us know if you have feedback! (MIT OSS)
Very happy I switched. I’m extremely productive on mobile. It defiiitely feels power usery but i am one so it works great.
My only gripe is sometimes it loses connections to workspaces in a way that is hard to recover BUT the meta conductor living on top can resolve it for me. Kudos for having it.
Thank you for your consideration and for your work.
If a dev is only going to choose one, I'd much rather they ship an AppImage.
I will avoid Meta and Google as much as possible.
But I think within claude code and codex subagent support has improved a lot lately and it doesn't seem this would improve that much over that native support if you only use one provider.
Why did you sell out?
The other reality is, there are now good free alternatives to Conductor (I haven't tried them so we will see) - it does suck if you feel very tied to your existing workflow, but I also think about it from the level of 'these people gave me something for free that helped me a lot, and I want things to work out well for them'.
Users chose them knowing full well the risks.
Build a product with paid customers, then you can choose not to sell out.
And thanks for the projection. I have a product with paid customers and I refuse to sell out. The project sinks with me.
> why sellout your company and your customers and community?
Why not? Do you think this is a heart project, that the founders have a personal passion for agent orchestration somehow? They're not curing cancer or supporting orphans, most companies are created to make money, that's how our economic system works (for better or worse, but I'm not going to blame individuals or be surprised about it).
"community"... Come on. There's customers, there's no community here.
Does anyone have suggestions for products that can match Conductor Cloud, not just Conductor Local?
Why? We let you bring your own cloud (versus being locked in).
You can bring a local cloud, sandboxes, or whatever you'd like
We even launched community plugins this week for VM/sandboxes (our you can have your own internal plugin)
We like the web + mobile app orientation (available without an app store!) along with the high degree of control.
Anyone moved between Paseo and T3? Curious to hear what motivated you in either direction.
Would highly recommend it for anyone looking for an alternative with Conductor shutting down.
Very happy to see the team get a happy ending/landing!
I've been working on a startup in the "private networks + VMs for agents" space, so I'm always trying to learn how people run their current setups.
I personally never thought Conductor was that great, so I built my own with https://podium.do.
What I was missing was a built-in task system so more complex tasks can be split up by the agents. And running agents on my own machines of course.
Interesting idea, but we find task data is too high throughput to put into git. I assume with the new crop of DVCSs that can handle much more volume this might change.
...
> Friday, Nov 20
> Conductor Cloud shuts down
> We begin deleting Conductor Cloud user data. Please export your data before this date.
Oh yeah, gonna love that!
disclosure: I am one of the founders
There is literally no moat in most software expect the users a product has acquired. The number of slightly different solution to an existing product is wild. And this is getting crazier. I build for the fun of it now. Completely lost any sight of $ goals.
I am building agents, have own gui framework, own server orchestration, and now looking at deploying multi-app servers using unikernels. I build for my niche audience and make them happy - I am going via my existing clients who are in the property management domain. Non technical folks who have to handle everything from inspection to finance. My ideal type of folks.
I am sure by the time I build my end to end agent/orchestration/deployment/management system, I will have some customers and many more clones. Slightly different clones. This is the future. Why would anyone acquire anything?
They need my prompts, not my tech.
I feel its less about the tech and more about the stage Meta and Conductor are in, right now
Sure they had a lot of growth but when there are a 100 alternatives, each offering something a bit different, then user bleed is natural.
Meta, Google and all big co will spend more $ short-term to buy and they will continue to bleed till the new playbook sets in the minds of execs.
both acquihires and products will get cheaper, could the new playbook be the OG marketplace ?
I don't see a Muse desktop app, this gives them something they can spin up in a few weeks, not months, with native cloud integration. I'd guess we're going to see a product competing with OpenAi/Anthropic (as far as standalone apps are concerned) by January.
I do not know where people are lost these days. I build ambitious apps with 3x $20 subscriptions. And I live in a village in eastern Himalayas. People are really in a bubble.
LLMs have crushed the idea of "using [another product] to jumpstart" anything. Just build it.
https://github.com/brainless/nocodo, https://github.com/brainless/dwata, https://github.com/brainless/akar, https://github.com/brainless/baho
All these and more, from a single engineer with 3 x $20 subscriptions. While I also run chicken and pig farms. It will take time for people outside tech hubs to understand what LLMs enable.
Raising money was not an indicator of value before LLMs but it helped a lot. I have been tech lead of a couple US based seed-funded startups and I definitely see the value.
But most software has no intrinsic hard engineering these days. A few do. Companies raise money because they feel they will grow into a large user-base. Then, either make money or get acquired. Where is "value" here? Its VC-speak all the way.
Privately funded AI labs in the US are buying, yes. I highly doubt this trend will go on when the return on investment starts fading. There is momentum in executives. The "value" is how they used to see things. Takes time to update.
nice to get paid by meta, but cmmon read the room.
> Conductor Cloud goes read-only on November 13 and shuts down on November 20.
3 sentences later
> Add your own completion sounds in Settings → General. Pick a sound file, name it, and choose it like any other sound.
If you're shutting down in *9 days* I really don't care that you added custom sound effects.
I switched to Paseo long ago because of its full featured mobile app, local client server architecture, and open sourcedness. Conductor began to feel stale, pricey, and understandably but annoying for me moving toward enterprise.
Its crazy how fast the tech field is moving
I guess that's the kick I needed to dig into the alternatives.
At least that's what I did.
It seems like it's got a lot of utility for my team and I, but jesus
No sign-up required - the angle I'm taking is that juggler is a client-server architecture, and if you want cloud VM sessions, you just spin up your own server and run a juggler server process on there. Its GUI is identical whether it's a local or remote session.
(I'd never actually heard of conductor, but interesting to see that people do want that kind of managed cloud backend server. I might think about the logistics of offering that)
And I promise to never sell-out to Meta[1].
[1] Nah, of course I would if they offered me a really huge amount of money.