Compare
An org chart of agents is not a company.
Agent orchestrators give you a polished way to manage AI agents: an org chart, heartbeats, budgets, tickets. That is real and useful. Synapse starts one level up — the company itself — and gives you a CEO, departments, a workspace, a wiki, a CRM, revenue and a board seat. Here's an honest side-by-side.
| Synapse | Typical agent orchestrator as published by competitors, Sept 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | ||
| Mental model | You are Chairman of a company run by a CEO agent | You manage a team of agents through an org chart |
| Primary interface | One CEO agent, plus the cabinet | Tickets and dashboards per agent |
| Availability | Hosted cabinet, free tier, live since June 2026 | Waitlist for hosted; local install via npm |
| Business model | Subscription, no revenue share, no AI markup | Open source (MIT); hosted offering on waitlist |
| Before you build | ||
| Idea validation | Free 6-axis VC audit with autonomy fit, FUND/WATCH/PASS | — |
| Company document | 8-step wizard → structured brief committed to your repo | Mission / goal hierarchy you define |
| Organisation | ||
| Org chart | Six permanent departments, humans and agents as equal roles | Hierarchies, roles, reporting lines; mixed human + agent |
| Governance | Written CEO authority document; propose above the line; approvals cabinet-only | Board approval for hires and strategy; pause / override / terminate |
| Goal alignment | CEO brief → milestones → tasks in real repos | Mission → project goal → agent goal → task ladder |
| Doing the work | ||
| Where work lives | Private GitLab workspace, 7 repos, real merge requests | Tickets inside the app; GitHub sync as an extension |
| Code review | Diffs, pipeline, conflicts, Merge / Deny in the cabinet; sensitive-path ack | Agents open PRs, you review in GitHub |
| Agent runtimes | Claude agent team (your subscription) today; any tool that speaks git | Bring your own agent: Claude, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, OpenClaw, OpenCode… |
| Scheduling | Task dispatch and CEO-driven prioritisation | Heartbeats: agents wake on a schedule |
| Cost control | Per-role model chains with cost caps; spend on your own keys | Monthly budget per agent; auto-pause at 100% |
| Tracing | Audit row on every write; live tool calls in chat | Full tool-call tracing; append-only audit log |
| Knowledge and memory | ||
| Knowledge base | Git-backed wiki; a folder is a page; agents read the repo | SKILL.md and per-agent context |
| Memory | Model-agnostic memory that survives provider switches | Per-agent runtime memory |
| Beyond engineering | ||
| Control from Claude | Native MCP server, 33 tools, OAuth 2.1, no keys | Skill file; agents call the orchestrator's API |
| CRM | Native, per company, with website lead capture | — |
| Revenue | Stripe Connect to your own account | — |
| Company website | {slug}.catalation.app from creation | — |
| Marketplace / transfer | Listings live; transfer built, gated | — |
| Extensions | MCP; MCP Universe integrations planned | Extension system: Slack, GitHub, webhooks, custom |
| Trust | ||
| Source | Platform is proprietary; your company's code is yours | MIT-licensed, self-hosted |
| Keys | Envelope-encrypted in a self-hosted vault; never in logs | Your agents, your secrets, self-hosted |
Where they are ahead
Credit where due
- Any agent runtime with a heartbeat — Codex, Gemini, Cursor, OpenClaw and more — plugs in today. Our agent team is Claude-first.
- Scheduled heartbeats and per-agent monthly budgets with auto-pause are simple and effective.
- Open source under MIT, installable in one command.
- A polished extension system.
We'd rather tell you this than have you find out.
Where Synapse goes further
The rest of the company
- A CEO with a written authority document that proposes what it can't decide — you don't manage agents, you manage a company.
- Validation before you spend: a free VC audit that can say no.
- Real repos and real merge requests, reviewed in the cabinet.
- A git-backed wiki and memory that survives model changes.
- CRM, lead capture, Stripe Connect and a public website: the parts of a business that aren't engineering.
- 33 MCP tools so Claude runs the company, not just the code.
- Live, hosted, free to start — today.
Use both. Nothing stops you pointing an agent managed elsewhere at a Synapse GitLab workspace, or connecting Claude to Synapse over MCP while your engineering agents run elsewhere. The work lives in standard git.