# Poly vs Superconductor for teams and coding agents

Superconductor is the multiplayer workspace for an engineering team with a backlog. Poly is the room for a small group building one thing.

Published 2026-09-16 by the Poly team. Canonical: https://usepoly.co/poly-vs-superconductor
Poly (usepoly.co) is a web app where a team builds with AI, Claude or ChatGPT, together in a shared room. Free to start: https://usepoly.co/

**Superconductor and Poly both call themselves multiplayer, and they organize work differently. Superconductor is a workspace for an engineering team: a ticket spawns one or several agent "implementations", each in its own cloud sandbox, and the whole workspace can chat in any of them, review the result with a QA agent's help, and ship a pull request. Poly (usepoly.co) is a room: one AI, one timeline, every member prompting, approving each change before it happens, and undoing any turn, with a receipt on each.** Superconductor has more surface area by far: eight agent harnesses, native desktop and mobile apps, benchmarks, integrations. Poly is the narrower tool for a pair or a small group, including people who do not code, with no keys to bring.

*Poly and Superconductor, from public documentation, September 2026.*

|  | Poly | Superconductor |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Unit of work | A room and its turns | A ticket and its implementations |
| Approve before the AI acts | Yes, per change, any member | Review at the pull request |
| Keys | None; billed as credits per person | Bring your own plan or API key |
| Who spent what | Receipt per turn, per person | On each user's own subscription |
| Agents | Claude Code and Codex | Eight harnesses |
| Parallel work | One turn at a time per room | Several implementations per ticket |
| Apps | Browser | Browser, macOS, Linux, iOS |
| Chat the AI cannot read | Yes | No |
| Setup | A prompt | GitHub repo and Docker dev environment |
| Price | Free start; $20 or $50 per AI user | Free 32 sandbox hours; Pro from $128 |

## What Superconductor does

Superconductor runs Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and five other harnesses in isolated cloud sandboxes with configurable network access and role-based access. The unit of work is a ticket; an implementation is an agent in a sandbox working on it; several can run side by side and a recommendation picks the best. Every implementation has a live preview, artifacts, a QA agent that checks the work before review, and guided code review with inline comments. Native macOS, Linux and iOS apps, Slack and GitHub integrations, and automations that turn emails or meeting transcripts into tickets. Model tokens are bring-your-own: connect a Claude or ChatGPT plan, or set an API key. Pricing is metered by sandbox hours, not seats: Free with 32 hours and four members, Pro from $128 a month.

## Where Superconductor is stronger

- **Breadth.** Eight harnesses, native apps on desktop and phone, benchmarks on your own repo, QA and review agents, integrations with Linear, Notion, Figma, Sentry and more.
- **Parallelism.** Several implementations of one ticket at once, compared side by side.
- **An engineering workflow.** Tickets, review, pull requests and merge automations for a team with a backlog.
- **Funding and pace.** A funded team shipping weekly changelogs since 2025.

## Where Poly is stronger

- **No keys.** Superconductor's model billing is bring-your-own-tokens: a non-technical cofounder must connect a Claude plan or hand over an API key before doing anything. In Poly nobody holds a key; usage is billed per person as credits, and every account starts free.
- **Receipts.** Because spend sits on each user's private subscription, Superconductor cannot show the room who ran what for how much. Poly's receipt on every turn does exactly that.
- **A say before it acts.** Superconductor's published position is that sandbox isolation plus review at the pull request replaces per-action approval; its docs say the AskUserQuestion tool is not supported. Poly's approval modes put every proposed change on every member's screen first.
- **The room, not the ticket queue.** Poly organizes around one conversation the agent is part of. For a pair building one thing, that is the whole product; for an engineering org it may read as missing structure.
- **Setup floor.** Superconductor wants a GitHub repo and a Docker dev environment. A Poly room starts from a prompt.
- **A channel the AI cannot read.** Poly's group chat and polls are hidden from the agent. In Superconductor, every message in an implementation reaches the agent, labelled with the sender.

## Which should you pick?

- **An engineering team with a backlog that wants parallel implementations, QA, review and native apps, and has its own Claude or ChatGPT subscriptions:** Superconductor.
- **A pair or small group, some of whom do not code, who want to build one thing together with no keys and a receipt on every turn:** Poly.
- **You want the agent's work as tickets and pull requests:** Superconductor. **You want it as a conversation with an undo button:** Poly.

## Common questions

**Do I need a Claude or ChatGPT subscription for Poly?**

No. Poly runs turns on its own provider accounts and bills them to you as credits. Superconductor requires you to connect your own plan or key.

**Can Poly run several agents at once?**

In multi-agent mode each member drives their own agent on their own branch, merged when ready. A single room's shared agent runs one turn at a time on purpose.

**Does Poly have QA or review agents?**

No. Poly's review is human: approval cards before a change and a diff per turn after. Superconductor's QA and review agents are a real difference for an engineering team.

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