Both Octopush and Conductor run multiple Claude Code agents at once, each isolated in its own git worktree on macOS — spin up several tasks, watch them work, review and merge. If parallelism over worktrees is all you need, they overlap cleanly. Where they part ways is how much you direct, and what it costs.
Conductor is a free, company-backed macOS app for running parallel Claude Code agents in isolated worktrees. Octopush does that too — real worktrees, a native app, and terminals that survive a restart. The honest starting point: for first-party parallel Claude Code, Conductor is excellent and free.
Running four agents in parallel gives you four transcripts to reconcile. Octopush's Direct mode gives you one pipeline: a cheap model plans, a strong one implements, another reviews — each stage with its own role, model, substrate (API or CLI) and reasoning effort, human checkpoint gates where you sign off, review loops, and a single escalation only after a proven failure. The ledger leads with what you saved.
Each stage gets the model it deserves and its own reasoning effort — plan on Haiku, implement on Opus, review on Sonnet — instead of paying premium for every token.
Every run shows dollars saved against an all-premium baseline. The number nobody else puts on screen: what routing actually saved you.
Human checkpoints pause the crew for your sign-off; review loops send work back with a bounded retry count. You stay editor-in-chief.
Agents run write-confined under the macOS seatbelt sandbox. Security is never behind the paywall.
Schedule crews (Days × Times, with an optional shell fire-condition) and let them run detached — they survive quitting the app, then notify you.
BYOK across Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek and local Ollama — two wire protocols and custom base URLs, so your gateway or local model just works.
Octopush is macOS-only, same as Conductor — neither is your answer on Linux or Windows. Conductor is free; Octopush Pro is $20/mo for unlimited and parallel Direct runs. Octopush's free tier is genuinely usable — Talk, Run and Review are unlimited, sandboxing is free, and you get 25 Direct pipeline runs a month, one at a time — but if you live on a flat Anthropic subscription and only need parallel Claude Code, Conductor's price is hard to beat. Octopush earns its keep when you're paying per token, routing across providers, or want a directed pipeline instead of parallel terminals. Competitor details are as of their public docs.
A native macOS app — Apple Silicon & Intel, signed updates. Bring your own keys: Claude, OpenAI, DeepSeek, or a local model with Ollama. Free to start.