Pane vs T3 Code

the real difference: chat or terminal

T3 Code shows agents as tidy chat threads. Pane runs each agent's own terminal, so any CLI works.

T3 Code talks to each agent through an adapter, an SDK or the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), and draws the conversation as a chat. That's why it looks so calm and consistent across Claude, Codex and Cursor. It also means T3 Code decides what you see. Agents it doesn't support can't run, and agent features it hasn't wired up don't show.

Pane starts the agent's own command line tool in a real terminal and shows it exactly as it is. Claude Code's slash commands, Codex's own shortcuts, a new agent that came out this morning: they all just work. You also get a plain terminal in every pane for your dev server or tests. The trade-off is that a terminal is busier than a chat, and each agent looks the way its makers built it.

windows and wsl

T3 Code is excellent on native Windows. Pane is the one that runs WSL repos without trouble.

On native Windows, T3 Code is excellent. Its installer is signed by T3 Tools, shows no prompts at all and opens the app in about 9 seconds.

WSL is where they split. T3 Code has the better-looking design on paper: pick a distro in Settings, then choose WSL only or both backends. On our PC (Windows 11, Ubuntu 24.04) its WSL server crashed every 10 seconds on a missing Linux module, and the app showed no error. Turning it off stopped the loop. A WSL folder added from the Windows side wasn't seen as a git repo either. T3 Code had 8 open WSL issues on October 3, 2026, so this isn't only us.

Pane opened the same WSL repo and ran Claude Code, terminals and git inside the distro, with no setting to find.

agents and subscriptions

Both use your existing subscriptions. T3 Code supports a named list plus ACP agents; Pane runs any command.

Both use the agent tools you already have and your existing logins, so a Claude or ChatGPT subscription works in either. Neither resells tokens.

T3 Code supports Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok, OpenCode, Google Antigravity and Pi by name, plus any agent in the ACP Registry. It handles several accounts per provider and can hand a thread from one provider to another with a slice of the conversation. Pane runs any command you can type, with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor built in, so agents like Gemini CLI, Amp, Aider or Goose work the day you install them.

agents that run other agents

Pane's orchestrator is in its stable release. T3 Code's is in nightly builds so far.

Pane's Sessions are an orchestrator chat with Claude Code, Codex or Cursor. A Session can start panes, hand out tasks, read their screens, wait for them and track their pull requests through the runpane command line tool and Pane's MCP server. It's in the stable release.

T3 Code's Orchestrator V2 adds something similar: agents can start child threads on any provider through a delegate_task tool and a T3 Code MCP server, plus scheduled tasks. It first shipped in a nightly build on October 3, 2026, and isn't in stable 0.0.45. Upgrading to it is one way, and the store phone apps can't connect to a V2 server yet.

phone and remote

T3 Code has native phone apps today. Pane's iOS and Android app is coming soon.

T3 Code is ahead here today. It has real iOS and Android apps with push notifications, a hosted web app and a T3 Connect relay, plus SSH hosts and Tailscale. T3 Connect and push need a T3 account. Nightly builds need the beta phone apps.

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.

defaults

T3 Code starts agents with full access in your main checkout. Pane starts every task in its own worktree.

T3 Code's default is Full access, so the agent can run anything without asking. New threads start in your current checkout, and finished-thread notifications are off until you turn them on. Pane puts every task in its own worktree by default and notifies you when an agent finishes or needs you.

T3 Code also writes hidden checkpoint refs into your repo (refs/t3/checkpoints, visible with git log --all), and the Codex app server it launched rewrote the formatting of ~/.codex/config.toml.

what we measured

Pane is smaller to download and install and lighter on CPU. T3 Code uses a little less memory.

On the same Windows 11 PC: Pane's download is 115 MB against T3 Code's 209 MB, and it installs to 429 MB against 492 MB. Pane relaunched in a median 3.6 seconds and T3 Code in 5.2. At idle, T3 Code used a little less memory (about 700 MB against 780 MB) but more CPU (2.2% of one core against 0.1%). Both are Electron apps. T3 Code ships 73 default keyboard shortcuts in an editable file. Pane has 62 commands in its palette, each with a shortcut.

From the first window to a committed change took us about 2 minutes 40 in T3 Code, with 4 avoidable steps, mostly its welcome wizard and a wrong project import.

momentum

T3 Code moves very fast, with nightly builds several times a day and a large community.

T3 Code is one of the fastest moving projects in this space: about 24,800 GitHub stars, nearly 400 contributors and seven stable releases in 25 days, with nightlies several times a day. It also had about 2,000 open issues, and it isn't accepting outside contributions yet. 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 T3 Code 0.0.45 from its signed 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. Agents ran on the account's existing Claude Code and Codex logins. We didn't sign in to T3 Connect, so we haven't tested the phone 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, release notes, 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
• → T3 Code 0.0.45 (stable), signed Windows x64 installer, WSL backend tried
• → Codex (GPT-5.5) and Claude Code on the account's existing logins

Who wrote this

We make Pane, so we have a stake in this. We tried to be fair: T3 Code'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

• → T3 Code on GitHub
• → T3 Code docs
• → T3 Code v0.0.45 release notes
• → T3 Code WSL issues
• → Pane on GitHub
• → Pane on Windows and WSL