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ArchGenie vs Baton

Bottom line

ArchGenie has a free plan plus paid upgrades, while Baton is free. Baton is open source and ArchGenie is not. You can run Baton on your own machine or server; ArchGenie is hosted by the vendor.

Which one should you try?

ArchGenie

Freemium

Best for Cloud architects and DevOps teams designing multi-cloud infrastructure

Visit ArchGenie See full review

Baton

Free

Best for Developers running multiple Claude Code or Codex instances

Visit Baton See full review

Pricing, capabilities and platforms side by side. Prices are as of the "Pricing checked" date in the table.

ArchGenie

ArchGenie

ArchGenie closes that gap by generating infrastructure code directly from architectural descriptions or uploaded sketches, then running security and compliance validation before anything touches a repository. The vendor describes a workflow where design intent moves to a validated pull request without a manual translation layer. Cost estimation across AWS, Azure, and GCP is built into the generation step, not bolted on afterward. The free tier is credit-capped at a low threshold, so teams doing iterative design work hit the ceiling fast. No API is exposed and no self-hosting is offered, which means the tool sits outside any existing pipeline automation a team already runs.

Baton

Baton

Baton sits in your menu bar and polls the signals your machine already produces — no manual logging, no clipboard tricks — to show you which AI coding sessions are mid-run and which have handed the decision back to you. The core metaphor is the 🎽 icon: the baton is with the agent, or it's with you. Click the menu, see the queue, jump straight to the session that needs a response. This is a local Python app, MIT-licensed, installed via a shell script, and it runs entirely on your machine. It works with Claude Code and Codex threads on macOS — nothing else, and no roadmap to something else is documented.

AttributeArchGenieBaton
PricingFreemiumFree
Price€29/mo—
Pricing checkedJun 11, 2026Not checked yet
Free trialNot statedNot stated
Open sourceNoYes
Has APINoNo
Self-hosted optionNoYes
PlatformsWeb-based SaaSmacOS
Pros
  • Generates infrastructure code directly from natural-language descriptions or uploaded diagrams, so the manual translation layer between architecture and Terraform disappears and the first draft is ready in minutes rather than days.
  • Security scanning and compliance validation run at generation time rather than in a separate CI stage, which means a misconfigured IAM policy or missing encryption gets flagged before the pull request exists — not after a security review blocks it.
  • Built-in cost estimation across AWS, Azure, and GCP is part of the output, so architects see the financial impact of a design decision at the moment they make it rather than discovering it during a budget review.
  • Direct export to version control as a pull request means the output lands in the team's existing review workflow without a copy-paste step, reducing the chance of drift between what was validated and what gets merged.
  • Observability and monitoring configurations are generated alongside infrastructure code, so the gap between 'code that deploys' and 'code that is observable' does not become a separate ticket.
  • Reads session state from signals your machine already emits with no manual tagging required, so you skip the meta-work of tracking the tracker.
  • Menu bar presence gives you persistent ambient visibility without opening a separate app, which means a stalled session doesn't stay hidden behind a terminal window you forgot about.
  • Click-to-jump navigation takes you directly from the status view to the waiting session, so the time between 'agent is blocked' and 'you respond' shrinks to a single click rather than a tab hunt.
  • MIT license and local-only architecture mean no data leaves your machine and no subscription gates the feature set — the thing you install on day one is the complete tool.
  • Install script handles dependency setup, so the gap between 'found this on GitHub' and 'running in my menu bar' is a single shell command.
Cons
  • The free tier enforces a hard credit cap that limits the number of generations per month; teams doing iterative design — where three or four architecture revisions are normal before a design is stable — exhaust the free allocation quickly and face a paid-only gate before the tool has proven its value in their workflow.
  • No API is available, which means generation cannot be triggered from a CI/CD pipeline, a GitHub Action, or any existing automation; teams that want infrastructure generation to run on push or on a schedule must maintain a separate manual step or abandon the tool in favor of a CLI-driven alternative that fits inside their pipeline.
  • There is no self-hosted deployment option, so organizations with data residency requirements, air-gapped environments, or policies against sending architecture diagrams to a third-party cloud service cannot use the tool at all — this is the condition under which regulated enterprises switch to open-source IaC generation tooling they can run internally.
  • macOS is a hard requirement with no documented workaround — developers on Linux or Windows cannot run this at all, and teams with mixed environments need a different solution from day one.
  • Support is scoped to Claude Code and Codex; the moment your workflow adds a third agent type — say, a custom LangChain runner or a Cursor session — Baton goes dark on that thread and you're back to manual tracking for part of your stack.
  • There is no shared or team-facing view: status is visible only to the person running the local app, so any team that needs collective awareness of which agents are blocked across multiple developers has to maintain a separate coordination layer.
  • Zero API surface means you cannot pipe Baton's session state into a dashboard, alert system, or ticketing tool — teams that want agent status wired into their existing ops tooling have to instrument that themselves from scratch or switch to a tool built for integration.

Made up your mind?

ArchGenie

Freemium

Best for Cloud architects and DevOps teams designing multi-cloud infrastructure

Visit ArchGenie See full review

Baton

Free

Best for Developers running multiple Claude Code or Codex instances

Visit Baton See full review

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Specs come from each tool's own site and docs (how we test). AIDiveForge is editorially independent.

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