AI agent managers for Windows

Three kinds of Windows support

A native app, a WSL-only tool and a browser UI are very different day to day, even when they all say “works on Windows”.

Native apps install like any Windows program and run their own terminals. Pane, Orca, Emdash, T3 Code and Paseo are in this group. You can use them without ever opening WSL.

WSL-only tools are Linux programs. Claude Squad, claude-tmux and recon need tmux, and Sidecar and Clor document WSL as the Windows path. They work well there, but you live in a Linux terminal and your Windows apps can't see what they do.

Browser or server tools run a daemon you open in a browser. HumanLayer and Omnigent work this way on Windows, and Omnigent only gets its full feature set when its server runs inside WSL.

Repos kept in WSL

Most Windows apps can open a WSL folder. Few run the agent inside the distro, and that's the part that matters.

Many developers on Windows keep code inside WSL because builds are faster on the Linux filesystem and their tooling is Linux-only. An agent manager can treat those repos in three ways. The good way runs the agent, the terminal and git inside the distro. The common way opens the folder through its \\wsl$ path and runs Windows git against it, which is slow and breaks scripts that expect Linux. The last way refuses the path.

In our tests, Pane, Orca, Herdr, Ghostex, Maestri and Solo scored 4 out of 5 on the first approach. T3 Code's WSL backend crash-looped. Paseo's Windows app couldn't start an agent in a WSL repo. Emdash rejected the path outright, and Waku and Reliant don't support WSL at all.

When you add a repo by its WSL path, Pane runs agents, terminals and git through the distro and keeps worktrees on the Linux filesystem. Your existing Claude Code or Codex login inside WSL is reused, so you don't sign in twice.

Windows on ARM

Snapdragon laptops run x64 apps under emulation. A native ARM64 build starts faster and uses less battery.

Pane, T3 Code, Paseo, Ghostex, Waku and Reliant ship ARM64 Windows builds. Traycer publishes x64 only and documents that it runs under emulation. Orca, Emdash, Maestri, Kandev, Agent Orchestrator, Herdr and Solo were x64-only when we checked.

Installers and SmartScreen

Unsigned installers trigger a SmartScreen warning. That's common in this category, so know what to expect.

Of the native apps, Orca, Emdash, T3 Code, Traycer and Reliant ship code-signed installers. The rest show a SmartScreen prompt the first time you run them. Choose “More info”, then “Run anyway”, after checking the download came from the project's own release page.

Two apps changed things outside their own folders on first launch without asking: Maestri installed 28 skill folders into agent configs, and Reliant added itself to the PATH. Back up ~/.claude and ~/.codex before trying several managers in a row.

Which to pick

Pick by where your code lives, then by whether you want a desktop app or a terminal tool.

• → Code on Windows, want a desktop app: Pane, Orca, Emdash, T3 Code or Paseo all work.
• → Code in WSL, want a desktop app: Pane, Orca, Ghostex, Maestri or Solo, which run the agent in the distro.
• → Live in a terminal already: Herdr runs natively and in WSL. Claude Squad and Sidecar work inside WSL.
• → Snapdragon laptop: Pane, T3 Code, Paseo, Ghostex, Waku or Reliant for a native ARM64 build.
• → Moving from a Mac tool: see Conductor alternatives for Windows and Superset alternatives for Windows.

Which Conductor?

This page means the Mac desktop app at conductor.build. Microsoft also publishes an open source project called Conductor, a YAML workflow tool for multi-agent pipelines, which does run on Windows. They aren't related.

출처

직접 실행한 내용

• → Windows 11 Pro on x64, with Ubuntu 24.04 on WSL2
• → Each app installed, pointed at the same test repo on both the Windows and the WSL filesystem, and asked to make and commit a small change
• → Mac-only tools checked against their download pages and docs

정정

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출처

• → Pane releases
• → Conductor docs
• → Claude Squad README
• → Microsoft WSL docs
• → Alternatives to Conductor, Superset, Claude Squad and others