Poly vs Sharkly for teams working with AI agents

Sharkly and Poly both call themselves multiplayer, and they do different jobs. Sharkly (sharkly.ai) is a work tracker, with issues, sprints and boards, where a ticket can be assigned to an AI agent such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor Agent instead of a person; the agent runs on a machine your team registers, writes its progress back to the ticket, and a person accepts the result. Poly (usepoly.co) is a browser room where a team steers one AI together while it works: every member prompts in one timeline, approves each change before it happens and gets a receipt per turn. Sharkly is for engineering teams who want agents working the backlog. Poly is for a small group, including people who don't code, building something together live.

What Sharkly does

Sharkly, from Anakin Labs, calls itself "the multiplayer workspace for human & agents." It has issues, sprints, boards and Gantt charts, with Jira import and two-way sync. Assign a task to an agent, or to a crew of agents, and the run starts on one of your registered machines, which Sharkly calls Computers, in its own git worktree. Progress and results land on the task, a later comment that mentions the agent starts a follow-up, and a person accepts the result before merge (docs). Standalone agent chat is private to whoever started it. It supports Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, OpenClaw, Cursor Agent and about twenty more. Sharkly doesn't sell tokens: model usage runs on the coding plan or API account you already pay for. It has web and desktop apps, and it can be self-hosted.

Where Sharkly is stronger

• Project management. Sprints, backlog, boards, Gantt charts and two-way Jira sync. Poly has none of that.
• Many agents in parallel. Each ticket gets its own agent and worktree.
• Any agent. More than 25 agent CLIs, on the subscriptions you already have.
• Price. Free for up to 10 people; Team is $7 per user a month billed yearly, and agents don't take seats (pricing).
• Self-hosting, for teams that need it.

Where Poly is stronger

• Steer it while it works. In Sharkly a run follows its ticket, and teammates add instructions through later comments. In Poly the whole room watches the agent live, answers its questions and redirects it.
• A say before it acts. Poly can put every proposed change on every member's screen before it happens. Sharkly's docs describe accepting the result after the run.
• Nothing to set up. Sharkly needs a machine of your own registered with its CLI, and your own AI plan. Poly hosts the sandbox and includes the models.
• Receipts. Every Poly turn names who ran it, which model and what it cost.
• Built for people who don't code. A timeline, cards and a live preview of the app.

Pricing, side by side

Sharkly: free for up to 10 people; Team $7 per user a month billed yearly; self-hosting priced on request; models on your own plans. Poly: free to start; $20 or $50 a month for each person who runs the AI, models included, and everyone else in the room is free.

Which should you pick?

• An engineering team that wants a tracker where agents pick up tickets, on the AI plans it already pays for: Sharkly.
• A team that wants Jira-style planning with agents in it, cheaply or self-hosted: Sharkly.
• A small group, including people who don't code, building one thing together live with approvals and receipts: Poly.

The two can sit side by side: plan the backlog in a tracker, and steer the hard build in a room. More options are in Multiplayer AI tools.