AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Druids – Build your own software factory
Hi HN! Druids (https://github.com/fulcrumresearch/druids) is an open-source library for structuring and running multi-agent coding workflows. Druids makes it easy to do this by abstracting away all the VM infrastructure, agent provisioning, and communication. You can watch our demo video here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJqW-tvSy4) to see what it looks like. At a high level: - Users can write Python programs that define what roles the agents take on and how they interact with each other. - A program is made of events - clear state transitions that the…
Druids is an open-source library for building multi-agent coding workflows. It allows developers to write Python programs that define agent roles and interactions while handling VM infrastructure, agent provisioning… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
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Budibase 2.0▲381Hi there, Mike here from Budibase. We’ve recently launched AI Agents into Beta, alongside our existing open-source app-building and automation tools. We built Budibase Agents for teams that want to leverage AI within real-world workflows, using their own LLMs, data, and APIs. Because of this, our Agents can be powered by any LLM with an OpenAI-compatible API, including open-source and locally-hosted models. This means you can build Agents that connect to your existing toolstack, within your own environment. Some more details: - Agents' behavior is configured using natural language…
2022 · budibase.com · its alternatives →
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Open Agents▲161OpenAgents - The collaboration OS for AI agents. Contribute to openagents-org/openagents development by creating an account on GitHub.
Apr 2026 · open-agents.dev · its alternatives →
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For almost two years, we've been developing Charlie, a coding agent that is autonomous, cloud-based, and focused primarily on TypeScript development. During that time, the explosion in growth and development of LLMs and agents has surpassed even our initially very bullish prognosis. When we started Charlie, we were one of the only teams we knew fully relying on agents to build all of our code. We all know how that has gone — the world has caught up, but working with agents hasn't been all kittens and rainbows, especially for fast moving teams. The one thing we've noticed over the last 3…
Jun 2026 · charlielabs.ai · its alternatives →
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Codex Subagents▲300Parallel custom agents for complex tasks
Mar 2026 · learn.chatgpt.com · its alternatives →
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Factory▲168Agent-native development on Web, IDE, CLI, Slack and mobile
2025 · factory.ai · its alternatives →
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Replicas▲239Hey HN! I'm Connor, creator of Replicas. I'm a heavy Codex/Claude Code user, and I wanted to hand off tasks to agents like I would to an engineer - kick something off before work, let it scaffold while I'm at lunch, even come back to a ready PR. The problem: existing alternatives use workspace VMs that are black boxes. I have no access to any of them - they can't run tests, read logs, or use tools like the Playwright MCP (which I use to verify agents actually fixed what they claim to fix). Replicas gives agents real cloud workspaces where they can: - Run your test suite and read the…
Jun 2026 · replicas.dev · its alternatives →
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SuperHQ▲95Hey HN, I built SuperHQ, an app that lets you run coding agents in local sandboxes (powered by Shuru). No custom UI wrapping the agents, they run as CLI/TUI like they were designed to. It just provides you the tools most of us (okay, maybe just me?) needed for running multiple coding agents in parallel without worrying about breaking your system or work environment. Each agent runs in its own microVM. You mount your projects in, writes go to a tmpfs overlay so your host is never touched, and you get a unified diff view to accept or discard changes. API keys never enter the sandbox, they…
Apr 2026 · superhq.ai · its alternatives →
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Velane▲95n8n is built for humans dragging nodes on a canvas. That breaks down at B2B scale (embedding in a product, multi-tenant scalability, etc). n8n does have an MCP server so agents can create workflows too, but it outputs raw JSON. That's fine for n8n's engine, but painful for a coding agent (or a human reviewing its output) to read, write, diff, or debug. I'm building an alternative where workflows are authored by a coding agent in [a more dev-legible format] instead of JSON blobs, and execute it at scale.
Jul 2026 · velane.sh · its alternatives →
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Boxes.devfree tier, from $19/mo▲112Hi HN, we’re Nick and Drew, and we’re building boxes.dev – the first cloud-only agentic dev environment (ADE) that gives every Codex and Claude Code agent its own cloud computer. We’re two engineers who previously built Gem (co-founder/CTO and first hire), and we spent the last year coding almost exclusively using Codex and Claude Code. It’s been a huge change to how we code, and it’s been exhilarating seeing the models keep getting better – but we eventually realized that developing on localhost was holding us back: - Git worktrees are clunky to set up and use for parallelizing work -…
Jun 2026 · boxes.dev · its alternatives →
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DruidX▲2Your Team's AI Workforce Built in Minutes, Not Months
Feb 2026 · druidx.co · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, we built SuperHQ, an open source app that runs AI coding agents in isolated microVM sandboxes instead of directly on your machine. Each agent gets its own VM with a full Debian environment. You mount your projects in, writes go to a tmpfs overlay so your host is never touched, and you get a diff view to accept or discard changes. API keys never enter the sandbox. We also just launched remote.superhq.ai which acts as a remote control for SuperHQ, allowing you to access your workspaces and agents from anywhere.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hello! We just released freeact (https://github.com/gradion-ai/freeact), a lightweight agent library that empowers language models to act as autonomous agents through executable code actions. By enabling agents to express their actions directly in code rather than through constrained formats like JSON, freeact provides a flexible and powerful approach to solving complex, open-ended problems that require dynamic solution paths. * Supports dynamic installation and utilization of Python packages at runtime * Agents learn from feedback and store successful code actions as…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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One framework for chatbots, webhook, voice & data agents
Apr 2026 · dronahq.com · its alternatives →
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Hello Hacker News! We're Yangqing, Xiang and JJ from lepton.ai. We are building a platform to run any AI models as easy as writing local code, and to get your favorite models in minutes. It's like container for AI, but without the hassle of actually building a docker image. We built and contributed to some of the world's most popular AI software - PyTorch 1.0, ONNX, Caffe, etcd, Kubernetes, etc. We also managed hundreds of thousands of computers in our previous jobs. And we found that the AI software stack is usually unnecessarily complex - and we want to change that. Imagine if you are a…
2023 · lepton.ai · its alternatives →
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Hello hackernews! I'm excited to share a new open source python library I just released for creating AI agent-integrated systems. The name is `agency`. It differs from other agent libraries, most importantly in that it's intended to address a distinct part of the overall problem, that of agent integration. It is not an agent toolchain like LangChain and others. `agency` is a framework intended for safely integrating agents with computing systems and humans in a way that all parties can easily understand and communicate with each other. I've spent a lot of time on the readme which contains a…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hopper▲100Hi HN, we’re Sai and Aayush, and we’re building Hypercubic (https://www.hypercubic.ai/), bringing AI tools to the mainframe and COBOL world. (We did a Launch HN last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45877517.) Today we’re launching Hopper, an agentic development environment for mainframes. You can download it here: https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper, and you can also request access and immediately get a mainframe user account to play with. There's also a video runthrough at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q81L5DcfBvE.…
May 2026 · hypercubic.ai · its alternatives →
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We just open-sourced the internal system we built at Assembled for running coding agents as a team. Coding agents worked well for individual engineers, but the surrounding workflow was a bit of a mess. We generally found that many engineers had different MCP connections and context for their agents, personal automations running that other people couldn’t access, and very little introspection for what a human’s input into the coding agent looked like. So we built an internal system that converted coding agents into shared team infrastructure. The system runs Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, and…
Jun 2026 · its alternatives →
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Single-agent LLMs suck at long-running complex tasks. We’ve open-sourced a multi-agent orchestrator that we’ve been using to handle long-running LLM tasks. We found that single LLM agents tend to stall, loop, or generate non-compiling code, so we built a harness for agents to coordinate over shared context while work is in progress. How it works: 1. Orchestrator agent that manages task decomposition 2. Sub-agents for parallel work 3. Subscriptions to task state and progress 4. Real-time sharing of intermediate discoveries between agents We tested this on a Putnam-level math problem, but the…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The Agentrun Workflow DSL. Contribute to Parcha-ai/agentrun development by creating an account on GitHub.
29d ago · github.com · its alternatives →
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Open-source AI agent runtime — build Agents in plain English
Jul 2026 · syntheticbrew.ai · its alternatives →
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We recently open-sourced Hive after using it internally to support real production workflows tied to contracts totaling over $500k. Instead of manually wiring workflows or building brittle automations, Hive is designed to let developers define a goal in natural language and generate an initial agent that can execute real tasks. Today, Hive supports goal-driven agent generation, multi-agent coordination, and production-oriented execution with observability and guardrails. We are actively building toward a system that can capture failure context, evolve agent logic, and continuously improve…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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DronaHQ helps you build internal tools, deploy AI agents, and automate workflows, without juggling multiple platforms or teams.
2022 · dronahq.com · its alternatives →
- 24LL
Some time ago I built a simple app to run swarms of coding agents — I call it fleet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256389). It's based on centralized beads with a Python orchestrator and can run any coder (Claude, agy, Codex). Recently I added a UI to manage the whole agent lifecycle: adding new tasks, monitoring running ones, and a chat interface built on MCP with a centralized SQLite DB. From the UI I can spawn agents to run in any directory, define dependencies on other tasks, and specify which coder/model should do the job. Today I can run 10–15 agents…
Jun 2026 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →