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Two open answers to the same question.
OpenHands is an open platform for running coding agents in containers, and it is a serious piece of engineering. Loom Conductor takes the opposite shape: a native 13 MB desktop app built around the official Claude Code CLI.
The shape of the thing
Platform in containers, app on your desk.
OpenHands: assemble your stack
It runs agents inside containers, which suits servers, research, and teams that want control over the runtime and the agent itself. If you want to host and hack the whole pipeline, it is a strong choice.
Loom: open the app
Tauri 2, Rust, and React 19 in an installer around 13 MB for macOS, Linux, and Windows. No containers to stand up, no orchestration layer to configure. It opens like a desktop app because it is one.
The official CLI underneath
Loom does not reimplement an agent. It conducts six real Claude Code CLI sessions using your existing Claude login, so the fleet needs no API key and behaves exactly like the tool you already know.
Beyond the agent
A workspace, not just a runtime.
Work where it runs
A WebGL terminal with tabs, splits, and search, a CodeMirror 6 editor with inline AI autocomplete, a source control panel with the full git graph, and auto-detected web preview of dev servers.
Conducted missions
A bring-your-own-key Conductor plans goals into a task DAG, dispatches across the fleet, answers permission prompts, recovers rate limits and stalls, and verifies work before it counts.
Security without a sandbox
Keys live only in the OS keychain, a secret-path deny-list guards reads and writes, an SSRF-guarded Rust proxy handles HTTP, and a workspace authorization registry gates every file, git, and shell operation. No telemetry.
Common questions
Choosing between them.
Is Loom open source too?
Yes. Loom is free and Apache-2.0 licensed, with the code on GitHub. Read more on the open source page.
Can Loom run models other than Claude?
The fleet is Claude Code through your login. The Conductor is bring-your-own-key across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Groq, Cerebras, DeepSeek, Mistral, OpenRouter, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or local LM Studio, MLX, and Ollama.
When is OpenHands the better pick?
When you want a self-hosted, containerized platform you can modify end to end. When you want a desktop app that conducts the official Claude Code with planning, recovery, and verification built in, that is Loom.
Hand it the work.
Walk away.
macOS, Linux, and Windows. Around 13 MB. Free and open source.