# Emdash vs Orca (slim)

> Orca scores 57.4 (C) to Emdash's 53.9 (D) for agent harnesses. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/emdash-vs-orca.md (~4,200 tokens) · this version ~1,030 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/emdash-vs-orca.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/emdash-vs-orca
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
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Orca scores 57.4 (C) on agent readiness against Emdash's 53.9 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Emdash leads on payments & pricing. Both do agent harnesses.

- Emdash: D 53.9, rank #927 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/emdash.min.md
- Orca: C 57.4, rank #791 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/orca.min.md
- Emdash, good for Developers who want parallel agents in worktrees, fed from their issue tracker, locally or over SSH. Ahead on Payments & pricing, 60 against 40.
- Orca, good for Developers who want an orchestrator agent to split work across parallel coding agents, on desktop or mobile. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 65 against 55; Agent ergonomics, 70 against 55; Security & auth, 43 against 38; Maintenance & community, 75 against 70.

| Category | Emdash | Orca |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 55 | 58 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 55 | 65 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 55 | 70 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 38 | 43 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 60 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 70 | 75 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 54 | 54 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Emdash | Orca |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | General Action, Inc. | Lovecast Inc. |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | MIT |

Why the edge:
- Payments & pricing, Emdash +20: Emdash 60 (Free self-hosted software with nothing to buy, so 0 for a protocol and 20 each for public pricing, a free tier and onboarding with no sign-up, 60.); Orca 40 (Scored on the cloud option. No protocol (0). The cloud price wasn't found on the pages read (0). The desktop app is free and MIT with no card (20). The local app needs no sign-up that we found (20). 0 + 0 + 20 + 20 = 40.)
- Agent ergonomics, Orca +15: Emdash 55 (Harness reading. Issue intake from Linear, GitHub, Jira and others, diff review, pull requests and CI checks in one place, local or over SSH (55).); Orca 70 (Harness reading. An orchestrator agent that splits work across workers in their own workspaces, chat or raw CLI, a browser and a CLI in one app (70).)
- Schema & documentation, Orca +10: Emdash 55 (Harness reading. Docs site and a workspace server package (55).); Orca 65 (Harness reading. A docs site with CLI orchestration and native chat pages (65).)
- Security & auth, Orca +5: Emdash 38 (Harness reading. Telemetry is described as optional and disabled in Settings or with TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false, which reads as on by default (15 of 30). Worktree per task and remote machines over SSH (10 of 20). No prompt-injection guidance (5). No audit log (5). No security policy file found (3). 15 + 10 + 5 + 5 + 3 = 38.); Orca 43 (Harness reading. Anonymous usage data with an opt-out, per the README's link to its telemetry docs (15 of 30). Worktrees per agent and a sandboxed Linux build (12 of 20). No prompt-injection guidance (5). No audit log (5). A dependency-security workflow (6 of 20). 15 + 12 + 5 + 5 + 6 = 43.)
- Maintenance & community, Orca +5: Emdash 70 (v1.2.11 on 6 November 2026 (30). v1.2.9, v1.2.10 and v1.2.11 within two weeks (20). GitHub issues and pull requests weren't read (GitHub's pages refuse these sessions), so that line is scored absent (0). Current installers and Homebrew cask (15). Release workflows, no test CI (5). 30 + 20 + 0 + 15 + 5 = 70.); Orca 75 (Tags to v1.4.251 and commits on 6 November 2026 (30). Many 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 builds (15). Extensive CI (10). 30 + 20 + 0 + 15 + 10 = 75.)