Baton vs Hanesu

Baton and Hanesu are both cli coding agents tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

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.

Hanesu

The project borrows from Harness Engineering principles: work is broken into phases with task files, role handoffs, quality gates, and progress artifacts written to disk. Agents using runtimes like OpenCode, Codex, or Claude Code run through that structure rather than a monolithic prompt. The vendor explicitly flags this is not for small, obvious edits — a direct prompt is faster there. Where it earns its place is multi-step refactors, security-sensitive changes, or bugfix workflows where you need the agent to stop, surface what it found, and wait for your sign-off before proceeding.

Attribute	Baton	Hanesu
Pricing	Free	Free
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	Yes
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	macOS	npm, GitHub
Pros	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.	Phase-gated workflow structure means the agent stops and surfaces findings before writing code, so risky refactors don't reach your codebase without a checkpoint you signed off on. Artifact writing is built into each phase, so decision records and discovery outputs are committed alongside the code change — teams doing security audits or post-incident reviews have a documented trail rather than a reconstructed chat log. MIT license and local repo installation means no external service dependency and no data leaving your environment, which removes the approval friction that blocks adoption in regulated or air-gapped codebases. Works alongside existing agent runtimes rather than replacing them, so teams already invested in OpenCode, Codex, or Claude Code don't have to abandon their toolchain to add structured workflow control.
Cons	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.	For tasks that are small or well-defined, the phase and artifact overhead slows the agent down relative to a single direct prompt — the tool's own docs acknowledge this, but teams will still burn time learning where that line sits in their specific codebase. The project carries 2 stars and 4 commits at the time of curation; there is no issue tracker activity and no documented community — teams hitting an undocumented edge case in the gate logic have no support channel beyond reading the source code themselves. Hanesu has no API and no integration surface beyond local repo files, so any team that needs to tie agent workflow state into CI pipelines, ticketing systems, or deployment gates will have to build that plumbing from scratch — at which point they are maintaining the workflow layer Hanesu provides plus the integration layer it doesn't, and a more mature agent orchestration platform becomes the faster path.

Bottom line

Baton and Hanesu are closely matched on pricing model, openness, and API availability — pick by feature set and platform support in the table above.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Baton and Hanesu?

Baton is Free and open source, while Hanesu is Free and open source. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is Baton better than Hanesu?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.

Baton vs Hanesu: which should I pick?

Pick Baton if its pricing model, openness, or platform fit matches your constraints; pick Hanesu otherwise. Check free-trial availability on each listing if you want to test before committing.

Comparison data is sourced and verified by the AIDiveForge data pipeline. AIDiveForge is editorially independent.