cmux is a genuinely good tool. It's a native macOS terminal built for running many AI coding agents in parallel, with programmatic control so an orchestrator agent can spawn, drive, and read every pane. If you live on a Mac and want agentic access to a fleet of terminals, it's worth your time.
Bootspring Agent Flow shares cmux's best idea — programmatic, two-way control of a fleet of live agents — and extends it with the three things cmux doesn't do: a visual canvas, automation triggers, and a receipt for every run. Cross-platform, too.
Early access: Agent Flow is in active development; this is a category + roadmap comparison, not a shipped product. See what ships when →
Quick comparison
| Capability | cmux | Bootspring Agent Flow |
|---|---|---|
| Live coding agents in parallel | ✅ | ✅ |
| Two-way agent-to-agent comms | ✅ | ✅ |
| Programmatic control loop | ✅ | ✅ |
| Visual canvas | ❌ | ✅ |
| Automation triggers (PR, webhook, schedule) | ❌ | ✅ |
| Per-run receipts + monitor-to-improve | ❌ | ✅ |
| Cross-platform (Linux / Windows / WSL) | ❌ Mac-only | ✅ |
What cmux gets right
The core insight is correct and we're building on it: an agent you can't see is an agent you can't improve, and the way to see them is programmatic access to every terminal. cmux's control loop (send, read-screen, send-key, close) and its flat "any agent can prompt any agent" model are exactly the right primitives. cmux itself notes that on Linux/Windows/WSL you fall back to tmux — the value is the programmability, not the GUI.
Where Agent Flow goes further
A visual canvas. cmux organizes agents as terminal panes and workspaces. Agent Flow renders the fleet as a graph you can draw: nodes are agents, edges are the message bus. The same graph is both the design surface and the live cockpit.
Automation triggers. cmux is something you drive. Agent Flow can be fired by the world — a GitHub PR, a schedule, a webhook — because it reuses Bootspring's existing automation engine. Your fleet becomes infrastructure, not a session you babysit.
Receipts and monitor-to-improve. cmux shows you the panes. Agent Flow records a receipt for every run and scores it, so you can tell which agents to reproduce and which are burning tokens. Seeing is step one; improving is the payoff.
Cross-platform by construction. Because Agent Flow is process orchestration plus a web cockpit — not a native Mac renderer — it runs wherever the CLI runs. Under the hood the backend can drive tmux (permissively licensed) or an owned PTY manager.
Verdict
Choose cmux if you want a polished, native Mac terminal for parallel agents today and you're happy driving it yourself.
Choose Bootspring Agent Flow when you want the same fleet power on a visual canvas, launched by triggers, with receipts — on any platform.