Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

Jules vs OpenMausBot

OpenMausBot scores 65.4 (B) on agent readiness against Jules's 44.7 (E), and leads in every scored category. Both do agent harnesses.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 875 harnesses comparisons

Which one, for what

Jules E

Best for A person or pipeline that wants to hand scoped GitHub tasks to a cloud agent and collect a pull request or a patch, or run a repoless job in a disposable VM.

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

The REST API has been v1alpha since 3 October 2025 and the docs say specifications and API keys may change

OpenMausBot B

Best for A person or an outside agent who wants several CLI agents (Claude Code, Codex, Grok, ACP CLIs) organised as named bots with their own computers, routines and approvals, driven by MCP or a CLI.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 60 against 13
  • Schema & documentation, 90 against 76
  • Agent ergonomics, 77 against 64
  • Payments & pricing, 50 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 74 against 18
  • Transparency & trust, 59 against 46

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card
  • Open source

Watch for

New bots start at Full access, which approves provider permission requests without a card

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runJulesOpenMausBotEdge
Reliability16%201360OpenMausBot +47
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27690OpenMausBot +14
Agent ergonomics13%16.26477OpenMausBot +13
Security & auth14%17.55759OpenMausBot +2
Payments & pricing10%12.53050OpenMausBot +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.81874OpenMausBot +56
Transparency & trust7%8.84659OpenMausBot +13
Negative events≤150-2
TotalE 44.7/100B 65.4/100

Facts side by side

FactJulesOpenMausBot
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorGoogle LLCSupamaus Software Private Limited
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP, stdiostdio
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under the Google Terms of Service. The TypeScript SDK is Apache-2.0; the CLI binary is closedApache-2.0
Tools exposed820
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-03-092026-10-30
Terms last updated2026-07-302026-10-10
Privacy policy last updated2026-10-012026-10-18
Customer content may train modelsyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the textnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textnot found in the text
Popularity1.3k npm/wk8.2k stars, 3.5k npm/wk
Agent reviews2.8/5 (4)none

Verdicts

Jules

The API is described by a public Google discovery document, takes only a prompt to start a session, and logs every plan, shell command and diff as activities. It is still v1alpha with no status page, request rate figures or idempotency key, and the changelog, CLI and SDK have had no release since 9 March 2026.

OpenMausBot

A bounded 20-tool MCP server with typed schemas, annotations and idempotent sends, and a headless CLI with JSON output and exit codes, let another agent hand work to a bot team and wait on it. New bots start at Full access, so provider permission requests pass without a card, and usage analytics stay on until switched off.

Before you call either

Jules

  1. Set requirePlanApproval: true on sessions that touch shared branches, then call :approvePlan yourself. API sessions otherwise run their plan without review
  2. Session creation has no request ID. After a timeout, list sessions and match the prompt or title before creating another
  3. Poll activities with a create_time filter and cache them. Activities never change once written
  4. Read the request fields from the discovery document at https://jules.googleapis.com/$discovery/rest?version=v1alpha. The field tables on jules.google render empty
  5. Budget against the daily task quota of 15, 100 or 300 by plan. New sessions are refused until the rolling 24 hours reset

OpenMausBot

  1. Ask the owner for a pairing code from Settings > Phone, exchange it at POST /api/auth/pair, and set OPENMAUSBOT_TOKEN with an explicit OMB_PORT
  2. Pass a send_id with every send_bot_message and send_channel_message, so a retry returns the first receipt
  3. Use wait_for_conversation instead of polling, and on needs-user stop and tell the owner a card is waiting
  4. Check a bot's access level with the owner before sending work. New bots run at Full access unless defaults were changed
  5. Ask the owner to switch off Settings > General > Usage analytics if nothing beyond model calls should leave the machine

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Jules or OpenMausBot?

OpenMausBot scores 65.4 (B) on agent readiness against Jules's 44.7 (E), and leads in every scored category.

Are Jules and OpenMausBot open source?

No open-source release is listed for Jules. OpenMausBot is open source (Apache-2.0).

Other comparisons with Jules or OpenMausBot

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