Omnara vs Roost

Where they differ

• An agent runtime versus a terminal. This is the whole difference. Omnara is where the agent runs: it owns the agent’s lifecycle, its state machine, its tool calls, its approvals, and its durability guarantees. Roost owns none of that on purpose — the agent is an ordinary command inside a real shell PTY, so it has no idea Roost exists, and Roost has no idea what a “tool call” or an “approval” is.

• What the surface actually shows you. Omnara shows a structured conversation: progress, streamed output, diffs, and approval prompts. Roost shows the literal cell grid the program is drawing, with full ANSI, scrollback, mouse support, and alt-screen TUIs — which is what you need to run htop, page through git log, answer an interactive prompt, or use a shell at all.

• Accounts and device keys. Omnara is account-based, with organisations, roles, and API keys, and its default path is Omnara Cloud. Roost is self-hosted, accountless, and user-operated: each authorized browser holds a non-extractable Ed25519 device key and signs ordinary requests. There is no Roost-hosted tier and no signup.

• Machines mean different things. Omnara’s machines are execution targets an agent can be handed, including vendor sandboxes from Blaxel, Daytona, or Unikraft, added or removed while the agent is running. Roost’s workers are your own long-lived macOS and Linux computers, enrolled once with roost add-machine --platform macos|linux, dialling outbound only so none exposes an inbound port, and shown in one sidebar with per-machine CPU, memory, disk, and network tiles.

• Both are open, and durable about different things. Omnara’s Apache-2.0 licence is real: self-host it with Docker Compose, and agent state is committed atomically to Postgres so runs survive crashes, restarts, and temporary machine disconnects. Roost’s durability is a keeper subprocess that hosts every PTY and outlives worker restarts and updates — session durability, not agent durability.

What you give up either way

• Choosing Roost costs you: agent supervision and retries, approval gates in front of side effects, secrets held on an agent’s behalf, HTTP MCP servers, skills, a Slack connector, and a two-way conversational voice mode — Roost’s voice is dictation typed into the session.
• Choosing Omnara costs you: a shell, panes, and scrollback on a machine you own; any CLI that is not one of its supported agents; and a client that is the same full application on a phone rather than a chat surface over an agent.

Use Omnara instead if…

You want a phone-first chat and approval workflow over managed agents and never need a shell. If the job is “let an agent work, show me what it wants to do, let me approve or redirect it from my phone, and make sure the run survives a crash”, Omnara is built exactly for that and Roost gives you none of it. Choose Roost only when what you actually miss is the real terminal on your own macOS or Linux machines.

What Omnara is

Omnara (YC S25) calls itself the open-source alternative to Claude Managed Agents: an Apache-2.0 platform for running managed agents, where it handles execution and state and you choose the models, tools, and machines. It is deliberately model- and machine-agnostic — bring your own API keys and any compatible endpoint, including OpenRouter, LiteLLM, and Ollama. You can run Omnara Cloud or self-host the whole thing with Docker Compose.

• Also ships: built-in and custom tools, skills, HTTP MCP servers, secrets, approvals, streaming, organisation and project RBAC for both users and API keys, a web dashboard, iOS and Android apps, a first-party Slack connector, and a conversational voice mode for driving an agent by speaking.

Sources

• Omnara (omnara.com)
• Omnara source (github.com/omnara-ai/omnara)

See the whole field on the alternatives hub, or read why Roost never owns the agent process in agents.