Pane vs Paseo

the real difference: a daemon or a desktop app

Paseo is a daemon you reach from desktop, phone, web and CLI. Pane is one desktop app with real terminals and git built in.

Paseo is built like a server. A background daemon runs your agents, and the desktop app, the phone apps, the web app and the CLI are all clients of it. That's why the same session is reachable from your desk, your phone or a browser, and why agents can be scripted from the command line. It also means there are more moving parts when something breaks.

Pane is one desktop app. Each agent runs in a real terminal inside it, and git lives in the same window: a Changes panel, diff tabs, commit, push, pull, rebase and merge, each with a shortcut. You can still drive it from scripts and other agents through the runpane CLI and Pane's MCP server, and reach it from another machine through Remote Pane.

windows and wsl

Paseo is quick on native Windows but can't run WSL repos from the Windows app. Pane runs them natively.

On native Windows, Paseo is quick to get into. There's no login, no tour and no wizard, it found Claude Code and Codex already signed in, and relaunching takes about a second and a half. The rough edges are around it: the installer isn't signed and asks two questions, the very first launch took 28 seconds while it downloaded about 1 GB of voice models, and the folder picker says "Finder".

WSL is the big gap. Paseo has no WSL docs. You can add a \\wsl.localhost path, but the Windows app didn't see it as a git repo, and the agent couldn't run any commands there (it failed with a raw CreateProcess error). The workaround people use is a second Paseo daemon inside WSL, which has known bugs, like the Windows and WSL daemons fighting over the same port.

Pane opened the same WSL repo and ran Claude Code, terminals and git inside the distro, with nothing to set up.

agents and subscriptions

Paseo drives 40+ named and ACP agents. Pane runs any command you can type.

Both run the real agent tools on your machine, so your Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions work as they do in the terminal. Neither proxies your model calls.

Paseo has six built-in agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Antigravity, Muse Code) and a one-click catalog of 36 more that speak the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), including Gemini CLI, Cursor, Amp, goose, Droid and Copilot. An agent that doesn't speak ACP can only run as a plain program in its terminal. Pane runs any command you can type as an agent, with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor built in.

agents that run other agents

Paseo goes deeper on agent-to-agent automation and schedules. Pane's Sessions orchestrate panes you can watch.

Paseo goes deep here. Turn on Paseo tools and an agent can create agents on any provider, message them by ID, hand off a task, ask a committee of two models for a second opinion, and run on a cron schedule or a heartbeat. Profiles tell the orchestrating agent which model to use for what.

Pane's Sessions are an orchestrator chat with Claude Code, Codex or Cursor. A Session starts panes, hands out tasks, reads their screens, waits for them and tracks their pull requests, and you can watch every pane it runs in the same window. Pane has no built-in scheduler.

phone and remote

Paseo has native phone apps today. Pane's iOS and Android app is coming soon.

Paseo is ahead on mobile today. Its iOS and Android apps are real native apps, pair with a QR code and connect through an end-to-end encrypted relay that's off until you turn it on. Reviewers keep naming the phone app as the reason they switched. A few security bugs on that relay were still marked open when we checked, so read the issue tracker if that matters to you.

Pane's own iOS and Android app is coming soon. Today, Remote Pane lets you run Pane on one machine and open it from another, including a phone browser, over SSH, Tailscale or HTTPS, with no account.

privacy and what each app touches

Neither sends your code or prompts anywhere. Paseo has no telemetry at all.

Paseo says it has no telemetry at all. Pane's product analytics turn off in Settings → Privacy. Neither sends your prompts or code anywhere.

The Codex app server that Paseo launched added trust entries to ~/.codex/config.toml for our test repos.

what we measured

Pane is the smaller download and install. Paseo launches faster and idles lighter.

On the same Windows 11 PC: Pane's download is 115 MB and Paseo's is 144 MB. Installed, Pane is 429 MB and Paseo is 536 MB, plus 984 MB of voice models it fetched on first launch. Paseo relaunched faster (1.5 seconds against Pane's 3.6) and used less memory at idle (about 490 to 570 MB against 780 MB). Paseo has 36 rebindable shortcuts with a searchable sheet. Pane has 62 commands in its palette, each with a shortcut.

From the first window to a committed change took about 3 minutes 30 in Paseo, with 6 of 14 steps avoidable: the installer pages, picking a model and a worktree, the empty Committed view, and committing through the agent.

momentum

Paseo is mostly one developer's project, moving very fast.

Paseo is mostly one developer's project, and it moves very fast: about 19,400 GitHub stars, 182 contributors and about 196 releases in eight months, with a beta channel on top. It had 557 open issues when we checked, 46 of them labelled Windows. Pane ships most days and accepts pull requests.

how we tested

On October 3 and 4, 2026 we installed both apps on one Windows 11 PC with WSL2 (Ubuntu 24.04). We ran Paseo 0.10.3 from its Windows installer and Pane 2.4.155 as a separate test copy, gave both the same task in a private test repo, and timed every step from the first window to a commit. We also added the same repo to Paseo through its WSL path. Agents ran on the account's existing Claude Code and Codex logins. We didn't pair a phone, so we haven't tested Paseo's mobile apps. We backed up every agent config before the test and restored anything an app changed.

Facts about each product come from its own docs, changelog, issue tracker and source code, checked on the same dates. Measurements are single-machine numbers, not lab benchmarks.

What we ran

• → Pane 2.4.155 on Windows 11, native and WSL2 (Ubuntu 24.04) repos
• → Paseo 0.10.3 (stable), Windows x64 installer, WSL repo added by its UNC path
• → Claude Code (Sonnet 5.5) and Codex on the account's existing logins

Who wrote this

We make Pane, so we have a stake in this. We tried to be fair: Paseo's strengths are listed as plainly as Pane's, every claim was checked against the product itself or its docs and source, and the screenshots are unedited captures from our own runs.

Corrections

If anything here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we'll fix it and update the date at the top. Open an issue on GitHub

Sources

• → Paseo on GitHub
• → Paseo docs
• → Paseo supported providers
• → Paseo Windows issues
• → Paseo changelog
• → Pane on GitHub
• → Pane on Windows and WSL