your teammate's agent is editing that file
agent teams coordinates the agents on your laptop. axis coordinates them across your whole team: claude code, cursor, codex and windsurf on one shared board, with a lock on every file. free and open source.
protocol
single-agent loops are linear. parallel agents collide and desync without a shared brain.
a distributed job board lets multiple agents partition and solve complex bugs together.
the live notepad syncs thoughts across agents, enabling collective reasoning in real time.
advisory per-file locks give every agent one authoritative answer on who owns what before it writes.
free
orchestration core. the open layer your swarm actually runs on.
pro
intelligenceeverything in free, plus the hosted intelligence layer.
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engine
real-time synchronization of state across disparate agent processes.
orchestrate complex workflows with an atomic, priority-based job board.
one owner per file at a time. advisory by default, with opt-in read-only hardening on the local server.
stream high-fidelity project goals and conventions into every loop.
what runs where
both surfaces expose the same tool names. they do not do the same work, so here is the honest split.
localripgrep plus a keyword ranker over your working tree. nothing to index, nothing to warm up.
hostedvector, full-text and trigram retrieval fused in postgres, then an llm reranks the top candidates.
localnot available. you get ranked files and the lines that matched.
hostedco-change neighbors mined from real lock activity, plus definitions of the symbols the top hit calls.
localnot available.
hosteda bounded retrieve, read and follow-up loop that answers with path:line citations.
localpushes file bodies up to the hosted index.
hostedincremental and content-hashed. unchanged files are skipped, deleted paths are pruned.
localadvisory. set AXIS_ENFORCE_LOCKS=1 and held files are chmod'd read-only, so tools that ignore axis get an error instead of a clobber.
hostedadvisory. the hosted server never touches your disk, so a lock coordinates rather than blocks.
identical on both surfaces and free forever. the coordination core is the same code path either way.
a pro key on the local server merges hosted results into the same call, but only when they return inside a 3-second budget. local results never wait on the network.