Grain vs Conductor

Quick answer

Conductor and Grain are complements more often than substitutes. Conductor gives a developer multiple agent workspaces, local execution on Mac, optional Vercel-sandbox cloud workspaces and collaboration around active coding. Grain takes an artifact that emerges from one of those workspaces and gives it a URL, access mode, comments and optional application services. The decision turns on who needs the result: developers coordinating code choose Conductor; readers or operators opening the finished output need Grain.

Fit first

What is different, verifiably

Where Conductor is better

• You need to run several coding agents in parallel and keep their changes separated into development workspaces.
• The collaboration target is the code and active agent prompt. Conductor Teams adds workspace sharing and real-time prompting for that job.
• You need an orchestration surface on Mac before anything is ready to publish. Grain does not manage parallel agents or review diffs.
• Your work should remain local during development, and a shareable output or hosted application is not yet required.

Where Grain is better

• The stakeholder needs to open a working result, not inspect a development workspace or code diff.
• The artifact must continue at a stable URL after Conductor's parallel local agents and their workspaces stop running.
• The result needs Postgres, login or scheduled jobs rather than Conductor's Pro multiplayer or Teams live-collaboration features.
• Access must be public, password-protected or invite-only, with comments that can become inputs for the next agent change.
• You need a Pro custom domain, exportable artifact files or a publishing core that is already described as self-hostable.

Moving between them

1. From Conductor to Grain: choose the agent workspace whose result is ready and merge or copy its intended files into a clean project folder. Parallel prompts, pending diffs and workspace collaboration state are not part of the artifact.
2. Run grain init in that folder. Grain creates a workspace and writes agent configuration for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor unless you opt out.
3. Have an agent verify the artifact and add Postgres, login or scheduled jobs only when the published use case requires them. Keep development-only tooling out of the reader-facing result.
4. Run grain push, grain checkpoint -m "publish Conductor result", then grain share --public or a protected share. Put the resulting URL in the code review or stakeholder update.
5. From Grain to Conductor: run grain pull, open the files in a Conductor workspace and assign agent tasks against them. Grain database data, accounts, schedules, comments, share rules and domains do not become Conductor workspace state.

Choice rule

Choose Conductor

if the work is coordinating multiple coding agents, reviewing their changes and collaborating inside development workspaces.

Choose Grain

if the work is publishing a finished artifact with a durable address, access rules and optional application services.

Use both

if Conductor runs parallel implementation streams and each useful preview, walkthrough or app is published through Grain for review.

Frequently asked questions