Compared

Murmell vs OpenHands Agent Canvas

OpenHands Agent Canvas is described by its makers as “a local, visual workspace for running AI coding agents”, built for “parallel agents, not single sessions”. Murmell is a cloud canvas of real terminals where those parallel agents share one directory instead of one each.

The real difference

This is the closest tool on the list, and the difference is one design decision. Agent Canvas runs several agents at once and isolates each in its own git worktree, all visible from one interface. Isolation is how it keeps them from colliding, and a worktree is a real second copy of your files on a branch of its own.

Murmell does not isolate them. Every agent on a canvas is in the same checkout, and the safety comes from asking rather than from separating: an agent claims the paths it is about to touch, the board records one holder per path and refuses everyone else until that holder releases it, and a colliding write is snapshotted before it lands. The rule is enforced by the server, not suggested to the model.

A worktree keeps agents apart. A reservation lets them stand in the same room.

The second difference is people. Agent Canvas starts on your own machine, one browser, one person. A Murmell canvas is a room: send a read link and someone else sees the windows, the terminal contents and a named cursor for everybody in it, live. Closing your tab does not stop the agents.

Where OpenHands wins

You can read all of it and you can run all of it. Agent Canvas is open source under the MIT licence, starts locally with one command and no Docker required, and connects to a Docker container, a VM you own or a cluster in your own network. The enterprise edition self-hosts inside your VPC. Murmell has no self-hosted option today, and if your code cannot leave your infrastructure the comparison stops there.

Its automations go further than ours too. Slack, cron, polling and event triggers ship in the product, and there is a Python library underneath if you want to write your own runner. Murmell launches CLIs on a canvas and nothing else.

Which to pick

Pick Agent Canvas when the code has to stay on hardware you control, when you want to change the tool itself, or when isolated parallel runs are exactly the shape of your work.

Pick Murmell when the agents genuinely need to be in the same tree, or when the run needs an audience. The machine that executes agent code holds no database and no decryption key, so an agent that escapes its box finds nothing worth taking, and work is pushed to a private repository per project. See what the canvas is.