Agent platforms compared
Last updated: 20 September 2026
"Agent platform" covers three quite different things. They don't solve the same problem, and comparing them side by side leads to the wrong pick.
| Cloud orchestration | Local command line | Desktop aggregation | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runs on | Vendor servers | A terminal on your machine | A desktop window on your machine |
| Examples | Dify, Coze, n8n | Claude Code, Codex CLI, Hermes, OpenClaw | Aiglade |
| How you drive it | Drag nodes on a flow chart | Natural language in a terminal | Dispatch, queue and approve in one window |
| Typical user | Teams, non-technical roles | Developers | People running several CLI agents |
| Can touch your files | No | Yes, with your permissions | Yes, through the agents underneath |
1. Cloud orchestration
A flow chart in a browser: an input node on the left, wired through "call model", "query database", "send email", with the lines deciding the order.
Good for: repeated business processes that don't change. Support answers, bulk content generation, gluing internal systems together — define it once, run it a thousand times.
Bad for: anything involving files on your machine. It runs on someone else's server and can't reach your disk. However neat the diagram, it won't tidy your photos.
One hidden cost: you build the flow yourself. The more carefully you build it, the more expensive it is to change — when the process shifts, the diagram gets redrawn.
2. Local command-line agents
This is the category that changed how people work over the past year. It's a program in your terminal: you say "change the login timeout to 30 seconds" and it finds the code, edits it, runs the tests.
Good for: clear goals that need to touch the local environment. Editing code, organising files, batch-processing data — if you can state the goal, it works until it's done.
Bad for: vague goals. It won't clarify your requirements for you; it picks a direction and runs.
The friction is running several. They're independent programs, one terminal window each. Four agents means four windows to switch between, checking which is stuck and which is waiting. That's not a defect in any of them — none of them was designed to know the others exist.
3. Desktop aggregation
The third category sits on top of the first two. Aiglade is one: it doesn't reimplement agents, it collects the command-line agents you already have into a single desktop window.
The change is in supervision cost. Progress for several agents on one screen, a shared queue, every approval request in one place — instead of four terminal windows you check one at a time.
Good for: people already running CLI agents who have started running more than one.
Bad for: people who haven't started. Aggregation solves a problem that only appears with multiple agents.
Symptoms of picking the wrong category
| Symptom | Likely mismatch |
|---|---|
| You want local files tidied, but it can't see your computer | Cloud orchestration doing local work |
| You're typing flow-chart-shaped instructions into a terminal | Command line doing orchestration work |
| Five terminal windows, and most of the day goes to switching | Ready for desktop aggregation |
| Three days building a flow that the next requirement invalidates | A one-off built as a permanent process |
Next: how to choose.