Orca runs your agents brilliantly.
It stops there, at your machine.
Orca is a genuinely good, free, open-source way to run Claude, Codex, and friends in parallel worktrees, with a real browser preview, mobile apps, even SSH into a VPS. What it doesn't do is show your team what's happening once more than one person is running agents. That's where NestMux picks up.
Solo agent orchestration is a solved problem now
Running Claude, Codex, and Gemini side by side in isolated worktrees used to be something you wired together yourself. Orca proved it's now a solved, commoditized problem, and a free one: tens of thousands of developers run it today without paying a cent.
What's still unsolved is what happens once a team adopts agents together. Nobody can see whose branch has an agent running right now, there's no shared view of flow or health across the team, and every prompt, MCP config, and piece of context stays trapped on one person's laptop. That's the part Orca doesn't touch, and it's what NestMux was built for.
NestMux vs Orca
Both tools run agents well. The difference shows up once you look past a single machine, in both directions.
| Feature | NestMux | Orca |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-agent grid (Claude, Gemini, Codex, Copilot, OpenCode) | ||
| Native git worktrees per pane | ||
| Real Chromium browser preview per worktree | ||
| Diff review with IDE handoff | ||
| Global search across all panes | ||
| GitHub integration (PRs, Issues, CI) | ||
| GitLab integration | ||
| Live terminal sharing via join code | ||
| Voice input (local transcription) | ||
| Real-time team chat & presence | ||
| Shared repos across the team | ||
| Team analytics (flow & health) | ||
| Auto-generated daily standup | ||
| Native Linear integration | ||
| Mobile apps (iOS + Android) | ||
| VPS / remote SSH worktrees | ||
| Free, open source (MIT license) |
When Orca is the right call
We're not going to pretend NestMux wins every case. Pick Orca when:
- › Are you a solo developer? You don't need a team dashboard, you need a fast, free, open-source way to run agents across worktrees, maybe from your phone or a VPS. Orca does that well and doesn't cost anything.
- › Do you want mobile or remote SSH worktrees? Orca ships iOS and Android apps plus SSH-based worktrees on a VPS. NestMux is desktop-only today: macOS, Windows, and Linux, with nothing on mobile or remote servers.
- › Is budget the deciding factor? Orca is MIT-licensed and free forever. NestMux has a free tier, but the paid plans that unlock team features start at $20 a month per seat.
- › Do you need native Linear, not MCP? Orca wires into GitHub and Linear natively. NestMux integrates GitHub and GitLab directly, and reaches Linear only through an MCP connection, not a first-class integration.
If you're one person running agents solo and want it free, open source, and available on your phone, Orca is a genuinely good choice, use it. NestMux is for teams who need to see how AI-assisted work moves across people, not just across one person's panes: live terminal sharing, team chat, flow analytics, and daily standups nobody has to write.
See it on your stack.
In 15 minutes.
Book a demo and we'll walk you through Nest with the AIs, repos and team you already use. Or grab the free build if you want to dive in first.