Conductor Build vs Capy

Conductor Build vs Capy is mainly a choice between local Mac orchestration and hosted browser orchestration. Conductor Build organizes parallel Claude Code and Codex agents in worktree-based local workspaces. Capy runs planned coding tasks in cloud VMs, keeps work team-visible, and connects execution to GitHub pull requests and review.

TL;DR

• Choose Conductor Build if you want parallel Claude Code and Codex sessions on your Mac, prefer local control, and already have agent subscriptions you want to keep using.
• Choose Capy if you want hosted execution that does not depend on a developer laptop, a shared browser workflow, and explicit Captain, Build, and Review roles.
• Both products support parallel AI coding, but they draw the boundary differently: Conductor coordinates local workspaces, while Capy coordinates cloud tasks and GitHub pull requests.
• Conductor Cloud is currently early access. It should not be treated as a generally available replacement for Conductor's Mac app.

What is Conductor Build?

Conductor Build is a Mac app for running coding agents in parallel. Its public homepage describes parallel Claude Code and Codex agents in isolated workspaces, with a view for seeing what agents are doing and reviewing and merging their changes. The product works on top of a developer's local repository workflow rather than moving the entire coding environment into a hosted service.

The isolation model is Git-native. Conductor's FAQ says that each workspace is a new git worktree, and its parallel agents documentation explains that a new workspace gets its own branch, files, and clean place for an agent to work. That makes separate workspaces appropriate for features, bug fixes, pull requests, or issues that should move independently through review.

Conductor also supports a second form of parallelism: multiple tabs or agent flows within one workspace. That is useful when agents should share the same branch and code state, such as when a developer wants to compare approaches before creating another branch. The distinction matters because not every parallel task needs a separate environment.

Conductor is particularly attractive when a developer already uses Claude Code or Codex and wants a better operational surface around those tools. Its public FAQ says Claude Code uses the login or API key the developer already has, including Claude Pro or Max plans. The trade-off is that the established product is tied to a Mac and its local environment. Conductor Cloud exists, but its official page labels it as early access.

What is Capy?

Capy is a browser-based platform for orchestrating coding work in the cloud. Its documentation describes a task workflow where an agent builds changes in its own VM, then the developer reviews the diff and creates a pull request. A Build agent can edit files, install packages, run commands, and commit code inside that isolated Ubuntu VM.

Capy separates planning from implementation. Captain reads a codebase and writes detailed specifications so that Build agents can execute focused tasks. This structure is useful when the work starts as a broad request rather than a ready-to-run agent prompt. Instead of asking a developer to manually divide a larger effort across local sessions, the platform gives planning an explicit place in the workflow.

Capy also has an explicit Review role connected to GitHub pull requests. The review documentation says the Review agent reads pull request diffs, produces structured findings with categories and severities, and posts medium-or-higher findings as inline GitHub comments. When Captain manages a task, it can triage findings and send real issues back to Build for fixing. Capy is therefore designed around a PR lifecycle, not only around generating a local diff.

Capy's public pricing starts at $20 per month. Credits are shared at the organization level and pay for AI usage, VM runtime, and auxiliary services such as Review. Capy's public product pricing says plans include unlimited concurrent threads, so the platform is intended for running multiple work streams without forcing a team to serialize them behind a single developer machine.

Head-to-head comparison

Where Conductor Build is the better fit

You want local Mac control. Conductor's core workflow is straightforward: keep the repository and coding environment on a developer's Mac, start workspaces, and inspect changes before merging them. For developers who prefer to keep their terminals, local services, and existing setup close at hand, that is a feature rather than a limitation. There is less conceptual distance between the agent and the environment the developer already understands.

You already pay for Claude Code or Codex. Conductor coordinates tools developers may already use directly. If a team is satisfied with those agent experiences and primarily needs a way to run several of them without juggling terminal windows, Conductor addresses the orchestration problem without introducing a separate hosted execution model. Existing Claude Code access can continue to work through the developer's current login or API key.

Git worktrees match how you want to isolate changes. A worktree and branch per workspace is a familiar Git abstraction. It is well suited to parallel local features and bug fixes that should remain separate until review. Conductor also avoids over-isolating related experiments by allowing multiple agent flows in one workspace when sharing code state is the desired behavior.

You want an active developer in the loop. Conductor's local workflow makes sense for engineers who want to watch agent progress, inspect the workspace, and intervene using their usual Mac tools. Capy's delegation model can remove laptop dependency, but not every developer wants that separation for every task. For hands-on local iteration, Conductor is a credible default.

Where Capy is the better fit

Execution should not depend on a laptop. Capy runs Build tasks in hosted VMs. That is useful for tasks that take time, need a clean Linux environment, or should continue while a developer closes a laptop or switches context. It also gives the team a consistent execution boundary instead of inheriting the state of whichever local Mac launched the task.

Work needs a team-visible home. Capy's browser workflow gives project work a shared surface. A teammate can follow tasks and GitHub pull requests without requiring access to another developer's desktop. This is particularly useful when the goal is not merely to accelerate one developer's local session, but to make delegated engineering work visible and reviewable across a team.

You want planning, building, and review to be explicit stages. Capy's Captain, Build, and Review roles make the handoffs visible. Captain turns larger requests into specifications, Build executes inside an isolated VM, and Review analyzes pull request diffs with structured findings. Developers can still review the result, but the workflow is designed for delegation rather than requiring them to manually coordinate every local agent session.

You want cross-provider model choice. Conductor's published workflow centers on Claude Code and Codex. Capy supports a broader selection of models, which can matter for teams that want to select models by task type, compare provider behavior, or avoid tying the whole workflow to two agent products. More choice is not automatically better, but it can be valuable when a team already has preferences across providers.

You want cloud parallelism as the current product, not an early-access add-on. Conductor Cloud is worth watching, but its official page is clear that access is early. Capy's hosted model is already the core workflow. Teams choosing a platform for laptop-independent execution today should evaluate that difference directly rather than assuming both cloud offerings have the same maturity or availability.

How to choose

Start with the environment you want to own. If developers should retain direct control of local repositories and already work comfortably with Claude Code or Codex on Macs, Conductor Build is the more natural choice. It adds an organized workspace layer without asking the team to adopt a hosted task system. Its worktree model is understandable, and its two kinds of parallelism cover both independent branches and shared-state experiments.

Choose Capy when the operational goal is different: work should run away from the laptop, stay visible to teammates, and flow through GitHub pull requests with explicit planning and review stages. Capy asks the team to adopt a hosted orchestration layer, and its credit model includes VM runtime as well as model usage. In return, the execution environment is not limited by the initiating developer's Mac, and model selection is not limited to Claude Code and Codex.

The products overlap on parallel coding agents, but neither is universally better. Conductor Build is a practical local control plane for developers who want to orchestrate existing agent tools. Capy is a hosted delegation system for teams that want planning, execution, review, and PR workflow collected in one browser-based service.

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