Anthropic's Claude-only agent harness in native desktop form, redesigned April 14, 2026 around a multi-session sidebar for parallel agents across repos, with integrated terminal/editor/diff viewer, cloud-hosted 'Routines' that run on Anthropic infrastructure while your machine is off, and the ecosystem that originated Agent Skills, subagents, hooks, plugins, and the headless Agent SDK (repo is issue tracker/docs; stars 136,750).
IDE & desktopproprietarysubscription✓ mcp✓ skills⛨ optional
Anthropic's terminal-native agentic coding tool and the category-defining harness, distinguished by its layered extensibility model (CLAUDE.md memory, Agent Skills, subagents, hooks, plugins, MCP) plus permission modes, checkpoints, and optional sandboxing, available from CLI/IDE/desktop/web with an Agent SDK for building on top.
Vendor CLI agentsproprietarysubscription✓ mcp✓ skills⛨ optional
ByteDance's VS Code-based AI IDE, notable for aggressive pricing (free tier plus $3-$100/mo token-based tiers, restructured Feb 2026) and the SOLO mode (standalone app since March 31, 2026) that acts as an end-to-end 'context engineer' handling requirements, code, terminal, browser testing and deployment, with MCP (stdio/SSE/streamable HTTP) and custom agents — but persistent privacy/telemetry concerns.
IDE & desktopproprietaryfreemium✓ mcp
Google's agent-first development platform (launched Nov 2025, Antigravity 2.0 at I/O 2026 moved it toward a production standalone desktop app), distinguished by its Agent Manager 'mission control' that orchestrates parallel agents across editor, terminal, and an embedded browser subagent, with agents producing reviewable Artifacts (plans, screenshots, browser recordings) and a persistent knowledge/learnings base; runs Gemini 3 alongside Claude and GPT-OSS models.
IDE & desktopproprietaryfreemium✓ mcp
YC-backed autonomous software engineer that picks up tickets from GitHub/Jira/Linear and opens tested PRs end-to-end across CLI, desktop, VS Code and cloud, distinguished by its own in-house Lumen model family (including on-device Scout and air-gapped sovereign variants for regulated industries like HSBC/NatWest/BAE) and the April 2026 'Swarm' feature for parallel long-horizon agents; credit-based seats at $20 (Hobby) and $200 (Professional).
Cloud / backgroundproprietarysubscription✓ local models⛨ optional
Enterprise-focused 'Droids' platform ($1.5B valuation after April 2026 Series C): autonomous agents that execute refactors, migrations and incident investigations end-to-end across CLI, desktop, SDK and remote 'Droid Computers' cloud workloads, with both local and cloud background agents on the $20 Pro tier and adoption at Nvidia, Adobe, Morgan Stanley and MongoDB; notably model-agnostic across frontier providers.
Cloud / backgroundproprietarysubscription✓ mcp⛨ optional
Anthropic's non-technical desktop agent built on the Claude Code harness (no terminal required) that works over local folders, browsers (Claude in Chrome), and full computer use, with MCP connectors, Agent Skills, and plugins — expanded to web and mobile in July 2026 with cloud-run sessions for Max subscribers.
General / computer-useproprietarysubscription✓ mcp✓ skills⛨ optional