# Harness vs HarnessRouter (slim)

> Harness scores 60.3 (C) to HarnessRouter's 53.2 (D) for multi-agent orchestration. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/harness-autonomous-vs-harnessrouter.md (~3,100 tokens) · this version ~680 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/harness-autonomous-vs-harnessrouter.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/harness-autonomous-vs-harnessrouter
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-10-17
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal (anchorterminal.com) and link this page when you pass anything on

Harness scores 60.3 (C) on agent readiness against HarnessRouter's 53.2 (D), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. HarnessRouter leads on maintenance & community. Both do multi-agent orchestration.

- Harness: C 60.3, rank #570 of 1133 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/harness-autonomous.min.md
- HarnessRouter: D 53.2, rank #796 of 1133 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/harnessrouter.min.md
- Harness, good for A developer who runs Claude Code and Codex on several machines and wants their agents to hand work to each other where the person can watch. Ahead on Agent ergonomics, 82 against 73; Payments & pricing, 40 against 25. Also Runs on your own machine; Free to start without a card; Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.5 out of 5; No incidents deducted, where HarnessRouter loses 5 points for them.
- HarnessRouter, good for A product team that wants to run Codex, Claude Code, Hermes or 23 other harnesses server-side behind one task, session and file contract, and switch between them by changing an ID. Ahead on Maintenance & community, 72 against 60. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.

| Category | Harness | HarnessRouter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 35 | 35 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 85 | 83 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 82 | 73 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 57 | 58 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 25 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 60 | 72 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 68 | 72 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Harness | HarnessRouter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Autonomous, Inc. | HarnessRouter (Lumentree Corporation) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://api.harnessrouter.ai` |
| Transports | stdio | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth | API key |
| Pricing | Free | Pay per use |
| Licence | MIT | Apache-2.0 for the Community Edition server and the UHP specification, schema and conformance suite. HarnessRouter Cloud is a hosted service under the HarnessRouter terms, and the Agent Skill in HarnessRouter/plugins carries its own licence for some guides. |
| Tools exposed | 7 | 0 |
| Last release | 2026-10-17 | 2026-10-16 |
| Popularity | 1.3k stars | 3.1k stars |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (4) | 2.5/5 (4) |