# Poly vs Sharkly for teams working with AI agents

Sharkly hands tickets to agents. Poly puts the team in the room with one.

Published 2026-10-03 by Richard Kaminsky and Mitchell Lipyansky, the co-founders of Poly. Canonical: https://usepoly.co/poly-vs-sharkly
Poly is a multiplayer AI coding workspace: a shared room where your team works with one AI agent, together. Free to start: https://usepoly.co/

**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.

*Poly and Sharkly, from public documentation, October 2026.*

|  | Poly | Sharkly |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What it is | A shared room around one AI | A work tracker with agent assignees |
| Several people steer one live run | Yes | No; follow-ups through comments |
| Approve before the AI acts | Yes, per change, any member | Accept the result before merge |
| Where the agent runs | Poly's per-turn sandboxes | Machines your team registers |
| Models | Included: Claude, GPT, Grok, Kimi, Muse | Your own plans and API accounts |
| Agents | Claude Code and Codex | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent and 20+ more |
| Project management | None | Issues, sprints, boards, Jira sync |
| Who spent what | Receipt per turn, per person | On your own AI accounts |
| Price | Free start; $20 or $50 per AI user | Free up to 10; $7 per user, yearly |

## 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](https://help.sharkly.ai/docs/welcome)). 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](https://sharkly.ai/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](/multiplayer-ai-tools).

## Common questions

**Is Sharkly a multiplayer AI tool?**

In the project-management sense, yes: people and agents share one tracker, and anyone can assign a ticket to an agent. It is not a shared live session; a run follows its ticket, and agent chat is private to whoever started it.

**Do I need my own computer to run agents in Sharkly?**

Sharkly's docs describe agents running on machines your team registers with its command-line tool, and we found no Sharkly-hosted compute as of October 2026. Poly runs every turn in its own hosted sandbox.

**Can I use Sharkly and Poly together?**

Yes. They overlap little: Sharkly plans and assigns the work, and a Poly room is where a group steers one build live.

More guides: https://usepoly.co/guides · Security: https://usepoly.co/security · Pricing: https://usepoly.co/pricing