Conductor is about orchestrating teams of coding agents. Polystro is about making the full local workstream survivable while those agents run.
Conductor is category-close because it is explicitly about orchestrating coding agents on your machine. The difference is that Conductor’s public story is orchestration-first, while Polystro’s wedge is environment-first. That matters if your pain is not assigning tasks to agents but keeping the surrounding workstream from collapsing.
Where the workflow actually diverges in practice.
Category focus
Polystro
Polystro is built around the workstream itself and the local environment attached to it.
Conductor
Conductor is explicitly an AI orchestrator for teams of coding agents on your machine.
What you can inspect
Polystro
You can hold multiple sessions and projects in view at the same time.
Conductor
Conductor clearly supports multiple agents and repos, but its public material does not show Polystro-style simultaneous session views.
Provider flexibility
Polystro
Polystro is neutral about the agent tools you bring in.
Conductor
Conductor is flexible inside the Claude Code ecosystem and compatible provider path, but not as tool-agnostic as Polystro.
Where the confirmed capability set differs.
This is the faster way to read the comparison: what we could confirm in the official material that actually matters to this workflow.
Free
Check for free, dash for free tier plus paid, cross for paid only.
Polystro
Conductor
No internal credit system
Check when usage stays with your own subscriptions/providers, cross when usage is bundled into internal plans or credits.
Polystro
Conductor
Multi LLM access
Check for broad multi-provider access, dash for a limited set across different companies, cross for company-specific models only.
Polystro
Conductor
Open source
Check for open source, cross for closed source.
Polystro
Conductor
Parallel agents
Official pages or docs confirm multiple agents or tasks can run at the same time.
Polystro
Conductor
Same-project side-by-side sessions
Can you see multiple agent sessions from the same project at once, side by side, instead of switching through a tab or thread list to inspect them one at a time?
Polystro
Conductor
Cross-project side-by-side sessions
Can you see agent sessions from different projects at the same time, side by side, instead of switching projects or session lists to inspect them?
Polystro
Conductor
Context-linked switching
When you switch projects, workstreams, or worktrees, do the browser, terminal, and attached context switch with you as one linked unit?
Polystro
Conductor
Multi-project visibility
Official material confirms project switching or multi-project work in the same product.
Polystro
Conductor
Browser in the workflow
A built-in browser or browser-assisted workflow is confirmed in official material.
Polystro
Conductor
Browser identity isolation
Separate browser identities, account views, or session isolation are explicitly documented.
Polystro
Conductor
Local routing and port handling
Ports, forwarding, or local app access are confirmed as part of the workflow.
Polystro
Conductor
Review and merge flow
Official material confirms built-in diff review, review queue, or merge workflow.
Polystro
Conductor
Prompting on the go
Away-from-desk continuation, web/mobile access, or similar async continuation is confirmed.
Polystro
Conductor
Local environment control
The product explicitly centers your machine and the attached local development environment.
Polystro
Conductor
Cross-platform desktop
Check for macOS + Windows + Linux, dash for 2 of the 3, cross for only 1 platform or no public confirmation beyond that.
Polystro
Conductor
$9/month billed yearly ($108/year) or $12 monthly
Yes. Bring your own CLI subscriptions and agent setup, and use the models those tools support without Polystro adding model credits or markup.
You pay Polystro for the desktop workflow. Your model and agent usage stay with the providers you already use.
Closed source
No public pricing page found.
Yes, but through the supported Conductor / Claude Code provider path rather than Polystro-style agent neutrality.
Conductor docs say it uses your local Claude Code login and supports Anthropic-compatible providers like OpenRouter, Bedrock, Vertex, and Vercel AI Gateway.
Closed source
Conductor positions itself as an AI orchestrator for AI-managers who run a team of coding agents on their Mac.
The compare-page goal is not to pretend every product is the same. It is to show where Polystro's wedge starts: the local workstream itself. That means the browser, routing, services, terminals, and project context stay attached while multiple agents work in parallel.