Bohay vs Switchboard

Bohay and Switchboard 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.

Bohay

The tool gives you a single interface to watch every agent's real status, not what the CLI reports but whether the process is actually doing work. File leases prevent overlapping edits before they're even assigned; isolated git worktrees keep agents from colliding on the same checkout; a test gate must pass before a task merges. Sessions survive terminal restarts, and each agent reloads its own chat history without you repasting flags. The orchestration board tracks dependencies so tasks wait for upstream work to clear the quality gate before they start.

Switchboard

Switchboard sits between your terminal and your CLI coding agents, inspecting each prompt and routing it to the right backend based on rules you define — local Ollama for the routine stuff, Codex for code, Claude Code when reasoning depth is worth the cost. The vendor's own benchmark reports 62% fewer premium-agent calls with a quality drop from 4.6 to 4.1 on a five-point scale — acceptable for most teams, not for teams where output consistency is non-negotiable. Sensitive prompts stay on-device by design, with zero benchmark leaks observed in testing. Routing decisions are logged with metadata-only telemetry, so you can audit what went where without storing prompt content. It ships with a Dockerfile and pyproject.toml, which means self-hosting is the deployment model — there is no hosted service.

Attribute	Bohay	Switchboard
Pricing	Free	Free
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	Yes
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	Terminal, macOS (notch panel)	—
Pros	File lease system prevents overlapping edits from being assigned in the first place, so two agents cannot be handed the same path — without this, the collision only surfaces after both agents have already written conflicting changes. Sessions persist across terminal restarts and each agent reloads its own chat history automatically, so a dropped connection or accidental close does not mean repasting context flags and reconstructing state by hand. Isolated git worktrees per task mean agents work on separate copies of the repo, so a half-finished feature branch cannot break another agent's passing tests mid-run. The quality gate requires your test command to pass before a task counts as done and before its branch merges, so broken code does not land in the shared checkout without you catching it. macOS notch integration surfaces every agent's live status and blocked requests in a native panel, so you can approve an agent without context-switching away from whatever you were doing.	Deterministic on-device prompt filtering before any network call, which means sensitive prompts cannot reach a cloud API even if your routing rules are misconfigured downstream. Unified session across Ollama, Codex, and Claude Code, so context you built up in one backend is not lost when the router hands off to another — avoiding the manual copy-paste loop developers run today. Metadata-only telemetry for routing decisions, which means you get an audit trail of what went where without storing prompt content that could become a compliance liability. Vendor-reported 62% reduction in premium-agent calls at a 4.1 vs 4.6 quality score, so teams can set a quality threshold and let the router handle cost optimization rather than manually triaging every prompt. MIT-licensed with Docker and Python packaging included, which means you can fork, modify, and run it in an air-gapped environment without negotiating a commercial license.
Cons	No API is available, so any team that needs to query agent status from an external dashboard, trigger tasks from a CI pipeline, or hook bohay into an existing internal tool hits a hard wall — the only integration surface is the terminal interface itself, and teams with that requirement switch to an orchestration layer that exposes a programmatic interface. The tool is terminal-first and currently targets Mac for the notch feature; teams on Windows are directed to an alternate install path with no equivalent native monitoring surface, and the vendor page offers precious little detail on Windows parity. Orchestration depends on a test command as the quality gate — teams without a reliable automated test suite get no meaningful gate, meaning the merge protection the orchestrator promises is only as solid as the tests backing it.	No API surface exists, so any service or script that needs to call the router programmatically cannot — teams that want to integrate Switchboard into a CI pipeline or a web app hit a dead end and either fork the project to add an API layer or replace it with a router that exposes one. The quality delta between routed and always-premium output is real: the vendor's own benchmark puts routed quality at 4.1 versus 4.6 for always-premium. Teams where output feeds customer-facing copy or code review tooling will find that gap shows up in production reviews, and they end up tuning rules until the router sends most prompts to premium anyway — at which point the cost savings disappear. With 2 GitHub stars and no open issues at time of curation, the community is effectively zero. When a routing edge case surfaces in production — and it will — there is no forum thread, no maintainer response history, and no third-party fix to pull. Teams with low tolerance for debugging undocumented behavior switch to a more established local proxy with an active issue tracker.

Bottom line

Bohay and Switchboard 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 Bohay and Switchboard?

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

Is Bohay better than Switchboard?

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.