Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

Crush vs Traycer

Traycer scores 57 (C) on agent readiness against Crush's 49.8 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Crush leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do agent harnesses.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 1500 harnesses comparisons

Which one, for what

Crush D

Best for Developers who want a Go terminal agent with a wide provider list, local models and Claude Code-compatible hooks.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 55 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 82 against 75

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

crush run approves every permission request automatically, which the README doesn't mention

Traycer C

Best for Teams who want several coding agents working together with shared context and boards.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 65 against 52
  • Agent ergonomics, 65 against 52

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Open source
  • No incidents deducted, where Crush loses 6 points for them

Watch for

Privacy Mode is opt-in for individuals; with it off, prompts may be logged

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Payments & pricing Crush +25

Crush 55

No payment protocol (0). Scored on Charm's Hyper provider. Its public provider file at hyper.charm.land/v1/provider lists per-million-token figures for 22 models without a login, but no pricing page confirms them as billed rates, and plan prices sit in a script-rendered app (15). The CLI is free to use and runs with your own provider key or a local model, so nothing needs a card (20). A local model through Ollama, llama.cpp or LM Studio, or an existing provider key in the environment, works with no Charm account, so an agent can install it and run a task without a person signing up (20).

Traycer 30

Scored on the paid option, Traycer's own inference subscription, whose price wasn't read (0 of 20). No protocol (0). Bring-your-own-agent use is free (20). Accounts for sync and teams weren't checked, half (10). 0 + 0 + 20 + 10 = 30.

Reliability Traycer +13

Crush 52

Local-package reading. @charmland/crush on npm, a Homebrew tap, Winget, Scoop, AUR, Nix, FreeBSD pkg, Charm's apt and yum repositories and release binaries, with supported platforms named in the README (20). The public build workflow runs go test -race -failfast ./... on Linux, macOS and Windows for every push to main and every pull request, but GitHub pages and the API answer 403 to us, so results are unread (15). The 18 October issue and pull request counts came from shields.io badges, a third-party copy of GitHub data, and are struck. The repository's own refs show 2,574 pull requests to #4224, 272 of them open with a merge ref, and 147 merges into main in the 90 days to 4 November. Crash and regression issues couldn't be read (10). Release notes are generated from commit messages, with no CHANGELOG file and no breaking-change headings found. The legacy JSON config is deprecated in favour of crushrc while still loading (7, held partial). v0.99.0, before 1.0, with no stability statement (0). 20 + 15 + 10 + 7 + 0 = 52.

Traycer 65

Local software. Builds for macOS, Linux and Windows, and package-manager publishing workflows (20). test.yml, CodeQL, OpenSSF Scorecard and secret scanning run on the repository; pass state not read (15). GitHub issues and pull requests weren't read (GitHub's pages refuse these sessions), so that line is scored absent (0). CHANGELOG.md (15). Host 1.5.3 (15). 20 + 15 + 0 + 15 + 15 = 65.

Agent ergonomics Traycer +13

Crush 52

Harness reading, scored on what an agent or pipeline driving crush run has to supply. About 20 built-in tools, any of which permissions deny hides, MCP servers take per-server disabled_tools, and skills can be turned off or kept out of the model's list. No lazy loading of MCP tools found (17). No turn, time or cost limit on crush run, and the only output controls are --quiet and --verbose (6). Errors come back as plain messages with a non-zero exit, such as the one for an unconfigured provider, with no documented codes and no JSON error record (8). --session and --continue resume a run, and crush session list, show, last, rename and delete take --json (13). One argument starts a run and environment keys are picked up, but there's no SDK, and the HTTP API needs CRUSH_CLIENT_SERVER=1 and is described only in one README section (8).

Traycer 65

Harness reading. Model switching within an agent, agent-to-agent loops, a CLI and cross-device sync (65).

Maintenance & community Crush +7

Crush 82

v0.99.0 tagged on 29 October 2026 (6 days, 30). 21 release tags from 7 August to 29 October, v0.88.1 to v0.99.0, besides a moving nightly tag that isn't counted (20). The 18 October shields.io counts are struck. The repository's refs show 147 merges into main and 438 commits in the 90 days to 4 November, with 272 open pull requests carrying a merge ref, and new contributors signing the CLA most days. Reply times couldn't be read (12). No SDK, as with other harnesses. npm, Homebrew, Winget, Scoop, apt, yum and NUR builds come from the release workflow (12, held partial). Dependabot, a go mod tidy check in CI and nightly security scans, with CI results unread (8). 30 + 20 + 12 + 12 + 8 = 82.

Traycer 75

Commits on 6 November 2026 and host 1.5.3 (30). More than three releases in 90 days (20). GitHub issues and pull requests weren't read (GitHub's pages refuse these sessions), so that line is scored absent (0). Current apps and CLI packages (15). CI with tests (10). 30 + 20 + 0 + 15 + 10 = 75.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCrushTraycerEdge
Reliability16%205265Traycer +13
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26565even
Agent ergonomics13%16.25265Traycer +13
Security & auth14%17.54142Traycer +1
Payments & pricing10%12.55530Crush +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88275Crush +7
Transparency & trust7%8.85960Traycer +1
Negative events≤15-60
TotalD 49.8/100C 57/100

Facts side by side

FactCrushTraycer
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorCharmTraycer AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyNone
PricingFreemiumFree
x402nono
LicenceFSL-1.1-MIT (source-available, each release converts to MIT two years after it is made available)MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-292026-11-06
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Popularity29k stars, 5.6k npm/wknone
Agent reviews2.3/5 (4)none

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

Crush

Works with almost any provider or a local model and needs no Charm account. crush run approves every tool call automatically, there is no sandbox, a project's .crushrc runs as shell code, usage metrics are on by default, and a fix that scopes session approvals to one command is on main but in no release.

Traycer

An open-source app for running several coding agents together with shared context, agent-to-agent messaging and team boards, on every desktop OS. Privacy Mode is opt-in for individuals, and the README says Sentry and PostHog may be on in release builds.

Before you call either

Crush

  1. Add permissions deny rules or a PreToolUse hook before crush run. It approves every permission request in its session, and a session approval in v0.99.0 covers later commands in the same directory
  2. Read .crushrc, crushrc and crush.json in a cloned repository before running Crush there. They execute as shell code at startup
  3. Set CRUSH_DISABLE_METRICS=1 or DO_NOT_TRACK=1 to stop usage metrics to data.charm.land
  4. Wrap crush run in your own timeout. It has no turn, time or cost limit flag
  5. Configure a provider by environment variable or crushrc first. With none, crush run exits with an error asking for interactive setup

Traycer

  1. Turn on Privacy Mode if you're an individual user and don't want prompts logged
  2. CLI agents you configure send requests straight to their provider; Traycer's own inference goes through Traycer

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Crush or Traycer?

Traycer scores 57 (C) on agent readiness against Crush's 49.8 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Crush leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community.

Are Crush and Traycer open source?

No open-source release is listed for Crush. Traycer is open source (MIT).

Other comparisons with Crush or Traycer

Machine-readable

For companies

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