Orbit vs Overplane

Orbit and Overplane 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.

Orbit

Orbit structures agent execution around a single concept: one task, one orbit, bounded by real checks — tests, lint, type validation — and recorded in inspectable JSON artifacts before anything advances. The vendor describes it as agent-neutral: Claude, Codex, Cursor, or any JSON-speaking CLI slots in behind the same contract, so teams can swap agents and compare output artifacts instead of gut feelings. The architecture is intentionally small, which means the harness is easy to verify and replay, but it also means Orbit does not ship workflow UI, cloud hosting, or a managed backlog service. Teams with complex multi-agent pipelines or a need for a hosted dashboard will be assembling those pieces themselves. Where it shines is the messy middle: failing tests handed to an agent, with proof required before the task closes.

Overplane

Overplane is a free, open-source CLI binary that wraps Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode in container isolation, spec-driven builds, and Z3 formal verification before a single line of code is written. Every agent run executes in a locked-down container with a restricted view of the host system, so a bad outcome means deleting a sandbox, not restoring a backup. Builds are content-hashed and content-addressable, which means you can replay any build down to a single spec and see the normalized dollar cost attached to that run. The ceiling appears early in teams who need the tool to also do its own code generation — Overplane is a build wrapper around agents you already own, not a coding agent itself.

Attribute	Orbit	Overplane
Pricing	Free	Free
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	Yes
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	Python; Linux, macOS, Windows (via WSL or native Python)	Linux, macOS, Windows (local binary)
Pros	Validation gates block task completion until tests, lint, and type checks pass — so an agent cannot mark work done without machine-verifiable proof, eliminating the silent failure mode where agents self-report success on broken code. Agent-neutral JSON contract means swapping from one coding agent to another requires no structural changes to the harness, so teams evaluating multiple agents get comparable artifact sets instead of incomparable anecdotes. Dependency-aware backlog selection keeps each orbit scoped to one task at a time, which means multi-step projects advance in verified increments rather than accumulating unvalidated drift across parallel agent threads. Structured artifact output — agent-result.json, evaluation.json, review.json, progress.md — gives reviewers an inspectable record of every decision and validation outcome, so audits and post-mortems have a durable evidence trail instead of reconstructed logs. MIT-licensed and self-hosted, so the entire execution environment stays on infrastructure the team controls — no vendor dependency on a cloud service that changes pricing or availability.	Every agent run executes in a locked-down container with a restricted view of the host system, so a compromised or misbehaving agent destroys a sandbox rather than your local environment or production credentials. Z3 runs on per-spec and merged Intermediate Representation models before any code is generated, which means logical contradictions in your spec surface as a pre-build error rather than a 4,000-line diff you have to reverse-engineer. Content-hashed images and content-addressable outputs make builds cacheable and replayable down to a single spec, so audit requests or incident investigations do not require reconstructing what the agent did from memory. Agent-agnostic design with per-project or per-run agent selection and normalized cost tracking across runs, which means you can benchmark Claude Code against Codex on the same spec without re-architecting anything. Apache-2.0 licensed with no hosted offering and no subscription, which means the tool introduces no vendor lock-in and no data leaving your infrastructure beyond what the agent API calls require.
Cons	Orbit ships no hosted control plane, no web UI, and no managed backlog service — teams that need non-engineers to review agent progress or manage task queues through a dashboard face a full custom build before Orbit is usable at that level. The harness requires every coding agent to speak JSON from the CLI; agents or tools that expose only browser-based or proprietary interfaces cannot be connected without writing and maintaining a custom adapter, which adds an ongoing maintenance surface. At the scale where a team needs parallel agent execution across multiple repositories with centralized visibility, Orbit's intentionally small scope becomes a structural ceiling — teams at that point are evaluating purpose-built CI orchestration platforms or managed agent infrastructure, not a local harness.	Overplane does not include a coding agent — it drives Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode, which means a team that does not already have those agents installed and API keys configured faces a multi-tool setup before a single build runs. Teams without an existing agent subscription hit this wall immediately and often reach for an integrated hosted tool instead. The tool is described as v0.0.8, which the vendor page does not present as production-stable. Teams evaluating it for a compliance-sensitive production pipeline face the specific problem of building internal policy around a binary that carries no stated stability guarantee — they document the version, pin it, and own the upgrade path. Formal spec verification with Z3 adds value only when specs are written to the schema Overplane expects. Teams migrating existing informal or prose-heavy spec documents spend the migration time rewriting specs before they see any verification benefit — the workflow does not adapt to how specs were written before.

Bottom line

Orbit and Overplane 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 Orbit and Overplane?

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

Is Orbit better than Overplane?

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.