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Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

Orca vs Paseo

Paseo scores 62.1 (B) on agent readiness against Orca's 57.4 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Orca leads on reliability. Both do agent harnesses.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 1500 harnesses comparisons

OrcaLovecast Inc. · Agent harness C57.4/100#795 of 1510 PaseoMohamed Boudra · Agent harness B62.1/100#577 of 1510

Which one, for what

Orca C

Best for Developers who want an orchestrator agent to split work across parallel coding agents, on desktop or mobile.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 58 against 50

Watch for

Anonymous usage data collected by default, with an opt-out

Paseo B

Best for Developers who want parallel coding agents on their own machines with no telemetry, reachable from anywhere.

Ahead on

  • Security & auth, 58 against 43
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 40
  • Transparency & trust, 68 against 54

Watch for

Pre-1.0, at 0.15.3

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 Paseo +20

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.

Paseo 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.

Security & auth Paseo +15

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.

Paseo 58

Harness reading. The README says no telemetry, tracking or forced log-ins (30 of 30). Worktree per agent, on your own machine (10 of 20). No prompt-injection guidance (5). No audit log (5). SECURITY.md (8). 30 + 10 + 5 + 5 + 8 = 58.

Transparency & trust Paseo +14

Orca 54

MIT (30). Privacy and telemetry docs on the site (not read) (18 of 30). No deprecation policy (5). Disclosed with an opt-out (15 of 20). 30 + 18 + 5 + 15 = 68.

Paseo 68

Apache 2.0 for everything but third-party components (30). No telemetry and agents run on your machine (22 of 30). CHANGELOG.md, no deprecation policy (10). States no telemetry (20). 30 + 22 + 10 + 20 = 82.

Reliability Orca +8

Orca 58

Local software. Desktop and mobile builds and a Homebrew cask (20). Unit, end-to-end and platform test workflows; 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). Tags to v1.4.251, no changelog file (8). Version 1.4 (15). 20 + 15 + 0 + 8 + 15 = 58.

Paseo 50

Local software. Desktop builds, an Android APK, a Docker image and a Nix package (20). ci.yml 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). Version 0.15.3 (0). 20 + 15 + 0 + 15 + 0 = 50.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runOrcaPaseoEdge
Reliability16%205850Orca +8
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26565even
Agent ergonomics13%16.27070even
Security & auth14%17.54358Paseo +15
Payments & pricing10%12.54060Paseo +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87575even
Transparency & trust7%8.85468Paseo +14
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 57.4/100B 62.1/100

Facts side by side

FactOrcaPaseo
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorLovecast Inc.Mohamed Boudra
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-11-062026-11-07
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked

Verdicts

Orca

An open-source orchestrator for coding agents with worker agents in their own worktrees, chat and terminal views, a browser and a CLI, on desktop and mobile, with heavy test automation. It collects anonymous usage data by default, and the cloud option's pricing wasn't found.

Paseo

A self-hosted, open-source workspace for running many coding agents on your own machines, scriptable from the CLI and reachable from phone, web or desktop, with no telemetry or forced log-in. It's pre-1.0 and run largely by one maintainer.

Before you call either

Orca

  1. See the telemetry docs on onorca.dev to opt out of anonymous usage data
  2. Use the orchestration CLI to hand a large task to one agent that starts workers

Paseo

  1. Run the daemon on the machine that has your tools and credentials, and connect from the clients
  2. Script runs from the CLI for repeatable agent jobs

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Orca or Paseo?

Paseo scores 62.1 (B) on agent readiness against Orca's 57.4 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Orca leads on reliability.

Are Orca and Paseo open source?

Yes. Orca is open source (MIT). Paseo is open source (Apache-2.0).

Other comparisons with Orca or Paseo

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