# HarnessRouter vs mini-swe-agent

> mini-swe-agent scores 56.7 (C) to HarnessRouter's 53.2 (D) for agent harnesses. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/harnessrouter-vs-mini-swe-agent
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- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (the whole catalogue as tools, no key)
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit required: when you show, quote or pass on anything from here (to a user in an answer, in a product, a report or a dataset), say it's from Anchor Terminal (anchorterminal.com) and link the page or API address you took it from. Reviews also credit their author.
- Updated: 2026-10-18

mini-swe-agent scores 56.7 (C) on agent readiness against HarnessRouter's 53.2 (D), and leads in 2 of 7 scored categories. HarnessRouter leads on schema & documentation, maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do agent harnesses.

- HarnessRouter: grade D, 53.2/100, rank #803 of 1146. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/harnessrouter.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/harnessrouter.json
- mini-swe-agent: grade C, 56.7/100, rank #698 of 1146. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/mini-swe-agent.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/mini-swe-agent.json
- Best agent harnesses and coding agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/best/agent-harnesses/index.md
- All 713 harnesses comparisons: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/agent-harnesses/index.md

## Which one, for what

### HarnessRouter (D)

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:
- Schema & documentation, 83 against 58
- Maintenance & community, 72 against 49
- Transparency & trust, 72 against 51

Also in its favour:
- A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install

Watch for: No status page found (status.harnessrouter.ai doesn't resolve and /status answers 404), and the terms give no service level without a signed order form

### mini-swe-agent (C)

Good for: Benchmark runs, research baselines and RL or fine-tuning pipelines that want a minimal, readable agent with a linear trajectory, and for people who want to read every line of their harness.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 70 against 35
- Payments & pricing, 60 against 25

Also in its favour:
- No key needed to call it
- Free to start without a card
- Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.5 out of 5

Watch for: The default local environment runs commands on the host with no isolation and the full host environment


## Score by category

| Category | Weight | HarnessRouter | mini-swe-agent | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 35 | 70 | mini-swe-agent +35 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 83 | 58 | HarnessRouter +25 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 73 | 69 | HarnessRouter +4 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 58 | 56 | HarnessRouter +2 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 25 | 60 | mini-swe-agent +35 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 72 | 49 | HarnessRouter +23 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 72 | 51 | HarnessRouter +21 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -5 | -4 | |
| **Total** | | **53.2 · D** | **56.7 · C** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | HarnessRouter | mini-swe-agent |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Vendor | HarnessRouter (Lumentree Corporation) | SWE-bench team (Princeton and Stanford) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.harnessrouter.ai` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP |  |
| Auth | API key | None |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | 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. | MIT |
| Tools exposed | 0 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-16 | 2026-07-23 |
| Terms last updated |  | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated |  | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models |  |  |
| Terms restrict automated access |  |  |
| Terms restrict benchmarking |  |  |
| Terms or service can change without notice |  |  |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver |  |  |
| Popularity | 3.1k stars | 8.6k stars, 4.4M PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (4) | 3/5 (4) |

## Verdicts

**HarnessRouter.** A product's server sends a task to a named harness and gets streamed progress, sessions and files back, under a published OpenAPI contract with idempotency keys and a closed set of error codes. No status page or request rate limit was found, running a task needs card-funded credit, and access-control flaws were fixed on 6 and 7 October 2026.

**mini-swe-agent.** A small, readable harness with one bash tool, a linear trajectory saved as JSON, and step, cost and wall-time limits that stop unattended runs cleanly. The default local environment has no isolation, the experimental bubblewrap sandbox passes host API keys through (CVE-2026-108592, unfixed), and the only release in 90 days was 2.4.6 on 23 July 2026.

## Before you call either

### HarnessRouter

1. Name the harness yourself. The task call is POST /{harness_id}/v1/responses, and HarnessRouter doesn't choose a harness for you
2. Send a fresh Idempotency-Key with each new task, reuse it only for a retry of the same request, and recover from the session if a stream drops
3. Call cancel to stop work. Closing the SSE connection leaves the agent running and billing
4. Keep the Workspace API key on the server. The docs forbid calling the API from a browser with it
5. Check each tool's enforcement in GET /v1/bases. On bases marked instruction, disabled_tools is a request to the model, not a block

### mini-swe-agent

1. Run with `-y --exit-immediately` for unattended use. Without `--exit-immediately` it waits for input when the agent finishes
2. Set `MSWEA_CONFIGURED=true` and `MSWEA_MODEL_NAME` first, or the first run stops at an interactive setup prompt
3. Read `info.exit_status` in the `-o` trajectory file. A run that hits its limits still exits normally
4. For untrusted repositories use `-c mini.yaml -c environment.environment_class=docker -c environment.image=<image>`. The local and bubblewrap environments both expose host variables
5. Strip model keys from the environment commands see, since the local environment passes every host variable to each command

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, HarnessRouter or mini-swe-agent?

mini-swe-agent scores 56.7 (C) on agent readiness against HarnessRouter's 53.2 (D), and leads in 2 of 7 scored categories. HarnessRouter leads on schema & documentation, maintenance & community and transparency & trust.

### Are HarnessRouter and mini-swe-agent open source?

Yes. HarnessRouter is open source (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.). mini-swe-agent is open source (MIT).


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/harnessrouter-vs-mini-swe-agent.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/harnessrouter-vs-mini-swe-agent.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "harnessrouter", "b": "mini-swe-agent"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare harnessrouter mini-swe-agent`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/harnessrouter.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/mini-swe-agent.json

## Other comparisons with HarnessRouter or mini-swe-agent

- [Agent Zero vs HarnessRouter](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/agent-zero-vs-harnessrouter.md)
- [Agent Zero vs mini-swe-agent](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/agent-zero-vs-mini-swe-agent.md)
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Query this catalogue directly over MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP, no key). How: https://www.anchorterminal.com/agents/#mcp