Claude Squad manages sessions, not tasks: each instance gets a tmux session and a worktree, and you switch between them, review diffs and push. It is a good way to run several Claude Code or Codex sessions at once. TaskTrooper is a level above: tasks with owners, a lifecycle and gates, with the sessions started and resumed for you.
| Dimension | Claude Squad | TaskTrooper |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Your terminal. | On your Mac: the desktop app starts an embedded Postgres, the Go backend and the agent sessions. Nothing hosted. |
| Who starts the work | You, per session. | The board. A card entering a column is dispatched to that column's agent; nobody presses run. |
| Unit of work | A session in a worktree. | A task on a board, with a branch, a PR and a column owner. |
| Roles, lifecycle, QA, deploy | None. | Six role agents (PM, architect, backend, frontend, mobile, QA) with seeded skills, rules, tool policies and memory. Add your own from a template or from scratch, and give each agent its own runtime: one board can mix Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, Antigravity and API models. Thirteen columns out of the box: analysis review, code review, QA, PM UAT, human UAT, Done merges, Released watches the deploy. A QA agent that cannot pass a task without executing: real requests, headless browser, iOS/Android simulators. |
| Parallel agents and tools | Several sessions side by side, each a full interactive agent. | Several tasks run at once (three sessions by default), each in its own workspace, branch and CLI session. Each role has its own tool policy, so the backend agent runs the test suite while QA drives a browser against another build and the architect reads a third task's pull request. QA has no code tools; the architect reviews and does not implement. |
| Agents | Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Aider. | Claude Code, Cursor, Antigravity and OpenCode as local processes; Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq or any OpenAI-compatible API. |
| Interface | Terminal UI. | Desktop app. |
| License | AGPL-3.0. | Apache-2.0. |
Choose Claude Squad if
- You want several interactive sessions side by side in a terminal.
- You want to stay hands-on with each one.
Choose TaskTrooper if
- You want tasks, not sessions, and you want them to move on their own.
- You want review, QA and deploy in the loop.
github.com/smtg-ai/claude-squad AGPL-3.0Described from public documentation; if something is out of date, open an issue.