Conductor vs Backgrind: parallel sessions or an overlay?

The facts, side by side

What Conductor does better

Credit where due: if the job is running several Claude Code tasks against one repo without them trampling each other, Conductor is the most polished way to do it on a Mac. Every workspace is an isolated copy of your repo on its own branch with its own agent and state, so five tasks proceed with zero conflicts, and the app gives you a proper review-and-merge flow when they finish. Conductor's own guidance — that 3–5 parallel workspaces is the sweet spot — is honest and matches what we hear from users too.

It's also free (you bring the Claude or Codex subscription you already pay for), it reuses however you're already logged into Claude Code, and it supports Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor agents. If you live at your desk, review every diff before merge, and never think about your agents once you close the laptop, Conductor may be all you need. Backgrind has no per-workspace worktree automation — with us you'd create worktrees yourself and point a tab at each (our worktrees guide shows the two commands).

What Backgrind does better

Conductor assumes you're in the Conductor window. Backgrind assumes you're not: the terminal floats always-on-top over your editor, a browser, docs — or a borderless-fullscreen game — and pings you only when an agent needs a yes/no, hits a question, or finishes. Ghost mode makes the window click-through so a game underneath gets your mouse while a toast stays tappable. When a PreToolUse hook holds a command, you approve from the toast, the chat, a hotkey — or your phone, because Live mode mirrors the session to any browser over an end-to-end-encrypted pairing.

Beyond the overlay: "Always allow" becomes a scoped policy rule (repo · tool · command, deny beats allow, full audit trail) instead of a blank check; the Fleet board gives you one grid across every session; the Fusion council asks your own Claude, Codex, and Gemini CLIs the same hard question (read-only in the repo) plus any OpenRouter model on your key, and a chairman judges one verdict; and if you'd rather skip CLI setup entirely, the hosted Grindy model (Pro) needs no API key. Backgrind is also the only one of the two that runs on Windows.

Or run both

There's no real conflict here. On a Mac, a setup we'd genuinely endorse: Conductor owns the git side — spin up worktree workspaces, review, merge. Backgrind owns the ambient side — the hours agents are grinding while you're reading, in a meeting, or in a game, with approvals landing as toasts and on your phone. If you'd rather keep one tool, decide by bottleneck: merge chaos → Conductor; babysitting a terminal → Backgrind.