Infinite canvas apps for AI coding agents, compared

An infinite canvas app gives each coding agent its own terminal tile on a surface you can pan and zoom, so you can see every Claude Code or Codex session at once instead of hunting through tabs. This page compares eight of them as of October 2026. Maestri, Starkomand, AgentGrid and Armadai are commercial, and TermCanvas, OpenCove, Cate and hivemind are free and MIT-licensed. They differ most in platform, price model, which agents they name, and whether one agent can lead the others.

What a canvas adds to running agents in terminal tabs

None of these apps replaces Claude Code or Codex. Each one starts the command-line agents you already have installed, under your own accounts, inside terminals it draws as tiles. What changes is where those terminals live. In tabs or tmux panes you see one or a few agents at a time, and you find the one waiting for approval by cycling through them. On a canvas every agent has a fixed place, you zoom out to see all of them and zoom in to work with one, and tools such as notes, a browser preview or a diff sit next to the agent they belong to.

A canvas does not stop two agents from editing the same files. That still takes a separate Git worktree per agent, which most of these apps create or display for you. If you are setting that up by hand, running multiple Claude Code agents at once covers worktrees, sessions and usage limits without any app.

The eight apps side by side

Every fact below comes from the app's own website, documentation or repository, read on 9 October 2026.

Maestri connects agents by drawing a line between them

Maestri's central idea is the connection: you link two terminals on the canvas and the agents can prompt each other, delegate, ask questions and hand off work. Maestro mode goes further and turns one agent into a lead that recruits, connects and dismisses other agents. The canvas also has sketching tools and sticky notes, and since version 0.49.0 its "floors" are Git worktrees of your project.

The free tier includes one workspace and unlimited agents. Pro costs $18 once, unlocks unlimited workspaces, covers up to two devices and comes with a seven-day trial. The Mac app needs macOS 15.4 or later on Apple Silicon, and there are builds for Windows 11 and for Linux. Its terms grant a personal licence and prohibit copying, modifying or redistributing the app. A fuller comparison is in Armadai vs Maestri.

Starkomand is built around handoffs and review loops

Starkomand names eleven agent CLIs: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Grok CLI, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Amp, Pi, Aider and Goose, plus any other you configure. Its canvas is organised around passing work along: you hand a task to a fresh agent with a focused brief, run bounded fix-and-review rounds, and can ask an agent to draw an editable architecture diagram beside the code. Its site describes handoffs you choose rather than an agent that directs the others.

It runs only on Apple silicon Macs. The trial lasts three days and needs no account or card. Pro is a one-time licence per Mac with a year of updates, priced from $49 to $169 depending on how many seats have sold, and purchases are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise.

AgentGrid pairs a master agent with workers on macOS, Windows and Linux

AgentGrid puts agents, terminals, a Chromium browser with DevTools, source control for each agent's worktrees and diffs, and markdown notes on one canvas. A master agent spawns worker agents on whichever harness you have installed, and AgentGrid names nine: Claude, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Antigravity, Kimi, Grok, Devin and Pi. Layout, notes and agent sessions are restored after a restart.

It runs on macOS 11 or later, Windows 10 and 11, and Ubuntu or Debian, and the desktop app requires an AgentGrid account. The free plan allows three projects with up to ten parallel agents each. Pro is priced as an early-adopter offer at $20 a month, or $16 a month billed annually, and adds unlimited canvases, cloud sync and cloud agents.

Four free, MIT-licensed options

If you would rather not pay, or want to read and change the code, these four are open source under the MIT licence and publish builds for macOS, Windows and Linux.

• TermCanvas nests terminals under the worktree and project they belong to, shows agents' edits as inline diff cards, lets you draw on the canvas, and saves the whole layout to a .termcanvas file. Hydra is a lead-driven workflow that dispatches work, watches it and merges the results. It names Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Kimi and OpenCode. The most recent release, 0.39.10, is dated 1 June 2026, and the macOS builds are unsigned.
• OpenCove is an infinite canvas for Claude Code, Codex, terminals, tasks and notes. It restores the viewport, layout, terminal output and agent state after a restart and isolates work with directories and Git worktrees. Its README marks it as alpha, and the macOS builds are not signed or notarized.
• Cate calls itself an infinite canvas IDE for parallel coding agents. Each Git worktree gets its own area of the canvas, agent status shows running, waiting or finished, and it works with Claude Code, Codex or any agent CLI. It installs with brew install --cask cate on a Mac.
• hivemind ships two built-in views, Canvas and Windows; Tiled, Queue and Board are plugin views that it marks as a development preview. A detached daemon keeps terminals running when the window closes, and one agent can spawn, connect and approve others with hive ctl. Prebuilt downloads cover Apple Silicon Macs, Windows x64 and Linux x86_64; Intel Macs need a build from source.

Armadai puts several projects on one canvas

Armadai is a native macOS app in which each project folder becomes a workspace with its own agents, terminals, code editor, browser, notes and task board, and several workspaces sit on the same canvas. That suits you if your agents are spread across a product, client work and a side project rather than all in one repository. A master agent, running Claude Code or Codex, opens workspaces, launches agents, sends them work and reads their replies from a sidebar conversation.

The same sidebar shows which sessions are working, idle or waiting for approval across every project, and lets you answer many approval requests without leaving your place on the canvas. From a task board you can hand a task to Claude Code or Codex; each run gets its own Git worktree, and successful work comes back as a draft pull request for you to review. If you prefer tabs, Tab View gives each workspace its own tab with a canvas inside it.

Armadai's agent tiles, master agent and task hand-off use Claude Code or Codex. It runs only on macOS, on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs with macOS 14 or later. It costs $20 a month or $120 a year after a 7-day free trial that requires an account and a payment method, and has no free plan. Details are under pricing.

Which one to choose

• You want it free and open source: TermCanvas if you want worktrees, diffs and a lead workflow on the canvas; Cate if you want a canvas IDE with worktree areas; hivemind if you want agents to keep running after you close the window; OpenCove if you are comfortable with alpha software.
• You work on Windows or Linux: AgentGrid, Maestri or any of the four MIT apps. Starkomand and Armadai are Mac-only.
• You want agents to talk to each other directly: Maestri, by connecting terminals; AgentGrid, through its master agent and workers; or hivemind, through hive ctl. Armadai's Coordinate does this for Claude Code and Codex inside one project.
• You want to pay once: Maestri at $18, or Starkomand if you use many agent CLIs and want structured handoffs and reviews.
• You run Claude Code and Codex across several projects on a Mac: Armadai, if you want every project on one canvas, approvals from one sidebar and task-board hand-offs to worktrees, and a subscription suits you.

If you are comparing apps that organise agents by task rather than on a canvas, Conductor alternatives covers Conductor, Superset, Emdash, cmux and Nimbalyst.