Compared

Murmell vs Vibe Kanban

Vibe Kanban is a board. You write tasks, move them across columns, and each one runs a coding agent in its own workspace on your machine. Murmell is a desk rather than a board: windows holding real terminals, all of them in one project directory on a cloud machine.

Read this first

The project’s own repository carries a notice that Vibe Kanban is sunsetting, with a link to the announcement. It is Apache-2.0 licensed, so the code stays available to run and to fork, but that notice belongs at the top of any comparison rather than in a footnote. Check it before you build a team habit on top of it.

The real difference

Vibe Kanban organises by task. Its pitch is breadth of agents, listing Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Amp, Cursor, OpenCode, Droid and others, with a workspace per task and a line-by-line diff you comment on before sending feedback back to the agent. It installs with one command and runs locally.

Murmell organises by directory. Agents are not separated: they share one checkout, and each claims the paths it is about to touch before writing. The board keeps one holder per path and refuses everyone else until the holder releases it, and a colliding write is snapshotted before it lands. Two agents can work through the same feature in the same minute.

The agents also run on cloud machines rather than your laptop, so closing the tab does not kill them, and other people can be in the canvas while it happens. A read link shows the windows, the terminal contents and a named cursor for each person, live, and read links are not capped.

Where Vibe Kanban wins

The board itself is a better fit for a queue than a canvas is. If your day is twenty small independent jobs, columns beat windows, and the diff review flow with comments going straight back to the agent is a tight loop.

It also runs on your own machine with your own keys, it supports more agents than Murmell launches today, and being Apache-2.0 means you can read it and change it. Murmell is not open source and has no self-hosted option.

Which to pick

Pick a local board when the work is a queue of separate tasks, the code should not leave your disk, and you want to own the tool.

Pick Murmell when several agents have to touch the same files, when the run should keep going without you, or when the people you work with need to see it. Work is pushed to a private repository per project, including one last push before a machine is torn down. See what the canvas is.