Maude vs Omnara
Both put Claude Code on your phone while the agent runs on hardware you control. They differ on how your session reaches the app, how many agents you can drive at once, and whether anything of yours passes through a third-party backend.
Omnara (YC S25) describes itself as a control plane for AI agents. You run its CLI where your agent lives, and it mirrors that session to a web dashboard and mobile apps — with an Apple Watch client and voice input on top. It handles Claude Code and Codex, and it has a free tier.
Maude is narrower: a mobile client for Claude Code over SSH, no relay in the middle. Both are reasonable; they optimise for different things.
The architectural difference
This is the part worth understanding, because most of the other differences fall out of it.
Omnara wraps and relays. Its CLI starts the agent on your machine, then syncs activity up to Omnara's cloud backend, which is what the dashboard, phone and watch clients read from. Your agent stays local; the session stream travels through their infrastructure. That is what makes the web dashboard, multi-device sync and the watch app possible at all.
Maude connects directly. The app opens an SSH connection from your phone to your server and talks to a small daemon there. There is no intermediary: no account of ours holds your session, and there is no backend of ours to be down. The cost of that is the flip side — no browser dashboard, and your phone needs to be able to reach the host (a public VPS, or a private one over something like Tailscale).
Neither is strictly better. A relay buys you reach and multi-surface sync; a direct connection buys you a shorter trust chain and fewer moving parts.
Side by side
| Omnara | Maude | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes | No — paid only |
| Paid plan | Pro tier, plus enterprise | $2.99/week or $59.99/year |
| Agents supported | Claude Code, Codex, and others | Claude Code only |
| Session reaches the app via | Omnara's cloud backend | Direct SSH from your phone |
| Web dashboard | Yes | No — apps only |
| Apple Watch / voice | Yes | No |
| Parallel agents | Yes (paid tiers) | Multiple sessions and servers |
| Needs a CLI installed on the host | Yes — the Omnara wrapper | Yes — a small daemon, deployed for you |
| Third-party account required | Yes | No account with us |
Omnara details gathered from their public site and repository in July 2026, and their platform was mid-migration at the time. Treat specifics — especially pricing and tier contents — as a snapshot and check omnara.com for the current position.
Where Omnara is the better pick
- You want to try it for nothing. Maude has no free tier; Omnara does.
- You use Codex too, or other agents. Maude is Claude Code only, so a mixed toolchain is an argument against it.
- You want a browser dashboard alongside the phone. Maude has apps and nothing else.
- You want to fan out across many parallel agents and watch them from one board — that is the shape of the product.
- An Apple Watch client and voice input appeal to you. Maude has neither.
Where Maude is the better pick
- You would rather nothing sat in the middle. A direct SSH connection means no third-party backend holds your session and no extra account exists to be breached.
- Your host is a VPS, not your laptop. Maude assumes an always-on server you own and is built around that; the setup path, multi-server list and cold session resume all follow from it.
- You want full permissions. Running Claude Code with no approval prompts is Maude's default posture, on the assumption that the box is disposable.
- You want the slash commands as real UI.
/model,/mcp,/compactand friends are native sheets rather than mirrored terminal output.
Try Omnara first if you want a free option, run more than one kind of agent, or want a dashboard and parallel-agent view. There is no cost to finding out.
Choose Maude if you are Claude-Code-only, your work lives on a server you own, and you would rather your session went from your phone to your box and nowhere else.
