amux vs Roost

Where they differ

• One host versus a fleet of hosts. amux runs on the machine where the agents run; the dashboard is that machine’s dashboard. Roost separates the control plane from the compute: one coordinator, N workers across macOS and Linux, the coordinator itself also a worker, and a sidebar that groups every live session by machine with per-machine CPU, memory, disk, and network tiles. Workers dial outbound only and never expose an inbound port, which is what makes a laptop, a desktop, and a VPS usable as one pool.

• Supported runtimes versus any command. amux’s supported set is Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI, and its automation is built around what those runtimes do. Roost never spawns, supervises, or owns an agent: the CLI is an ordinary command inside a shell PTY, so any tool runs, including Claude Code. Ten CLIs additionally get first-class status detection and a launcher entry; everything outside that list runs exactly as well, just unlabelled.

• An orchestration product versus a terminal-fidelity product. This is the real fork in the road. amux is trying to make many agents work unattended — watchdog, board, cron, cost accounting, agent-to-agent channels. Roost is trying to make one real terminal on your macOS or Linux machines feel native from any device: panes and Arrange presets, keyboard parity, dictation into the session, and Web Push on working, needs input, and done.

• tmux-backed sessions versus PTYs the control plane owns. amux drives tmux. Roost’s keeper subprocess hosts every PTY directly and outlives worker restarts and updates, and the worker keeps an authoritative cell grid: rebuilt at one agreed width on resize so history never re-reflows, a monotonic seq on every frame so a reconnecting viewer gets exactly one authoritative full frame, on-demand scrollback, atomic two-column spans for double-width CJK and emoji, mouse tracking forwarded only when the program asked for it, and predictive echo above roughly 10 ms round-trip time.

• Mobile, where amux comes closest. amux is the nearest thing in the field to Roost on the web-dashboard-plus-mobile axis: it ships a PWA and a native iOS app for monitoring, approving, and recovering sessions. Roost’s phone client is the same full application as the desktop one, with touch selection, a latching-Ctrl key row, a swipeable terminal-card deck, and a soft keyboard that offsets content instead of reflowing the terminal.

What you give up either way

• Choosing Roost costs you: per-session token and cost tracking, a task board with atomic claiming, a self-healing watchdog, cron scheduling, and agent-to-agent channels. Roost has no cost tracking and no task board today, and it will not restart a crashed agent, compact its context, or hand it the next ticket — it does not own the agent process at all.
• Choosing amux costs you: more than one machine in one view, any CLI outside its three supported runtimes, voice dictation, and a control plane that owns the PTY rather than driving tmux.

Use amux instead if…

You want unattended overnight fleets of agents with auto-restart, cost accounting, and a kanban board on a single host. Roost deliberately owns none of that, so if your bottleneck is coordinating dozens of parallel runs rather than reaching a real terminal on the machine of your choice, amux is solving your problem and Roost is not.

What amux is

amux, by Mixpeek, is an MIT-licensed control plane for parallel coding agents: a single Rust binary that drives tmux sessions and serves a local HTTPS dashboard at https://localhost:8824. You register a project, start it, and run amux serve; it targets 5 to 50 concurrent sessions on macOS, Linux, or a cloud VM. Its centre of gravity is unattended operation: a fleet left running overnight is still working in the morning.

• Also ships: a self-healing watchdog that auto-compacts context, restarts crashed sessions, and replays the last message; a SQLite kanban board with atomic claiming so two agents cannot take the same work; a REST API plus channels so sessions message each other and peek at each other’s output; shared notes for memory across sessions; per-session token-spend tracking; a PWA and a native iOS app; and a cloud tunnel for a stable public URL.

Sources

• amux (amux.io)
• amux source (github.com/mixpeek/amux)

See the whole field on the alternatives hub, or read what Roost does and does not do with agent processes in agents.