Compared

Murmell vs Cursor

Cursor is an editor. It is the best keyboard in this comparison, and its cloud agents extend that keyboard into machines you never see. Murmell is not an editor. It is a shared canvas of real terminals, sitting on one cloud machine and one project directory.

The real difference

Cursor documents the cloud model plainly: agents “run in isolated VMs in the cloud with full development environments instead of on your local machine”, and they “clone your repo from GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps Services, or Bitbucket Cloud and work on a separate branch, then push changes to your repo for handoff”. You can run as many in parallel as you like. Isolation is what makes that safe, and a branch is where the work waits for you.

Murmell removes the copies. Agents share one checkout, and an agent claims a path before it writes to it. The board keeps one holder per path and refuses everyone else until that holder releases it. Nothing merges at the end because nothing forked at the start.

The second difference is about people rather than agents. Cursor is one editor per person, and agent output is shared once it exists. A Murmell canvas has more than one person in it while the work happens. Guests see the windows, the terminal contents and where everyone is looking, with a colour and a name on each cursor.

Where Cursor wins

The editing itself, which is not close. Tab completion, inline edits and the whole surface of writing code by hand belong to Cursor, and Murmell does not compete for that work. Cursor also gives its cloud agents a remote desktop, so you can use the changed software and edit it yourself without checking the branch out locally.

And it will run those agents inside your own network. Cursor made self-hosted cloud agents generally available, with a worker process that “connects outbound via HTTPS to Cursor’s cloud” and no inbound ports to open. Murmell has no self-hosted option today. If your code is not allowed to leave your infrastructure, that decides it.

Which to pick

Pick Cursor when you are the one writing, or when the answer to more work is more independent agents each on their own branch.

Pick Murmell when several agents have to touch the same files in the same hour, or when the useful thing is other people watching the run rather than reading the diff. Murmell launches the Claude Code and Codex CLIs on its own machines, so the agent you already pay for is the agent in the window. See what the canvas is.