How to run multiple Claude Code sessions in parallel in 2026: 9 ways compared

Disclosure: Enjoy is our product. We checked every way below against Anthropic’s documentation and each maker’s own pages on October 29, 2026, and we say where another way is the better pick, including the free ones that need nothing but Claude Code.

The ways to run Claude Code in parallel, compared

You can run several Claude Code sessions at once, and Anthropic’s own power user tips call it “the biggest productivity unlock”: “running 3–5 Claude sessions in parallel, each in its own git worktree.” The questions are who keeps track of the sessions, where they run, and how you keep them out of each other’s files.

Way	Best for	Price, checked October 29, 2026	Runs where	Who coordinates
Terminals with claude --worktree	Free, if you’re at home in a terminal	Free with Claude Code	Your computer	You
Agent view, claude agents	Handing off tasks and checking back	Free with Claude Code	Your computer, in the background	You, from one screen
Subagents and /batch	Splitting one task inside a session	Free with Claude Code	Inside one session	Claude
Agent teams	Workers that talk to each other	Free with Claude Code; experimental	Your computer	A lead session
Claude Code Desktop	Parallel sessions without a terminal	Included in Claude Pro ($20 a month), Max (from $100), Team and Enterprise	Mac, Windows; Linux in beta	You
Cloud sessions	Work that keeps going with your computer off	Included in Pro, Max and Team	Anthropic’s machines	You
Enjoy	Claude Code next to other labs’ agents, across all your projects	A monthly subscription, free for 7 days (pricing)	Mac, Windows, Linux	You, with a superagent over everything
Orca	Many agents, free and open source	Free	Mac, Windows, Linux	You
Conductor	A polished app, if you’re on a Mac	Free; Pro $50 a month	Mac	You

Every way here runs on your Claude plan or API key, and every session draws on it. Claude’s pricing says “Claude Code is included in all paid plans”: Pro is $20 a month, or $17 billed yearly, and Max is “from $100.” The free plan doesn’t include Claude Code.

Before you start: worktrees and usage

Two things apply to every way below.

• Give each session its own copy of the files. Two sessions in one folder can overwrite each other’s edits. A Git worktree is a separate checkout on its own branch that shares the repository’s history. Claude Code’s worktree guide says a worktree “is a fresh checkout,” so dependencies need installing again, and a .worktreeinclude file copies gitignored files such as .env into each new one.
• Every session spends the same plan. Anthropic’s comparison page says “running several sessions or subagents at once multiplies token usage.” Several busy sessions reach your five-hour and weekly limits that much sooner. When they do, see what to do when Claude Code hits its usage limit.

Terminals with claude –worktree

Best for: people at home in a terminal who want nothing extra.

Open a terminal tab per task and start each session in its own worktree:

claude --worktree feature-auth

Claude Code creates the worktree “under .claude/worktrees/<name>/ at your repository root, on a new branch named worktree-<name>,” and you “run the command again with a different name in another terminal to start a second isolated session.” Add --tmux to open each one in its own tmux session (claude -w feature-auth --tmux). When you exit, Claude removes a clean worktree or asks whether to keep one with work in it. You can also make worktrees yourself with git worktree add and run claude in each.

Price: free with Claude Code.

Watch for: you track every session, review every diff and merge every branch yourself. The repository needs at least one commit first, or the command fails with Failed to resolve base branch "HEAD". New worktrees branch from your default branch on the remote, not your current work, unless you set worktree.baseRef to "head".

Agent view, with claude agents

Best for: handing several tasks off and stepping in only when one needs you.

Agent view, which you open with claude agents, is in Anthropic’s words “one screen for all your background sessions: what’s running, what needs your input, and what’s done.” Start a task from your shell with claude --bg "investigate the flaky test", or press ← on an empty prompt to send the current session to the background. A separate supervisor process runs the sessions, so “you can close agent view, close your shell, or start a new interactive session and your dispatched work keeps going.” Before a background session edits files, Claude “moves the session into an isolated git worktree under .claude/worktrees/.”

Price: free with Claude Code.

Watch for: “Agent view is in research preview. The interface and keyboard shortcuts may change.” “Each session uses your subscription quota independently,” and while sessions survive sleep, “shutting down or restarting your machine stops running background sessions.” Sessions you have open in other terminals don’t appear until you background them.

Subagents and /batch

Best for: letting Claude split one task into pieces inside one conversation.

Anthropic’s comparison page describes subagents as “delegated workers inside one session that do a side task in their own context and return a summary.” Ask Claude to “use worktrees for your agents,” or add isolation: worktree to a custom subagent, so parallel edits don’t collide. The /batch command packages this up: it has Claude “split one large change into 5 to 30 worktree-isolated subagents,” each of which, per Anthropic’s tips, tests its changes and opens its own pull request.

Price: free with Claude Code.

Watch for: you steer only the main session; subagents report back to it, not to you. Anthropic’s cost guide says “every subagent… sends its own requests on top of the main conversation’s.” And Anthropic now advises folding many subagents into one agent with skills; see why it says to stop using most subagents.

Agent teams

Best for: work where the workers need to share findings and challenge each other, such as a review or a hard bug.

Agent teams make one session the lead, which spawns teammates that “work independently, each in its own context window, and communicate directly with each other” through a shared task list. Turn them on with CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1 in your settings or environment, then ask for teammates in plain words. Each teammate can have its own tmux or iTerm2 pane, and Anthropic suggests starting “with 3-5 teammates for most workflows.”

Price: free with Claude Code, but heavy on usage.

Watch for: “Agent teams are experimental and disabled by default,” with “known limitations around session resumption, task coordination, and shutdown behavior.” Anthropic’s cost guide says they use “approximately 7x more tokens than standard sessions when teammates run in plan mode.” Teammates don’t get worktrees, so “two teammates editing the same file leads to overwrites.” Split panes aren’t supported “in VS Code’s integrated terminal, Windows Terminal, or Ghostty.”

Claude Code Desktop

Best for: people who only use Claude and want parallel sessions without a terminal.

Claude Code is the Code tab of Anthropic’s Claude desktop app. “The sidebar lists your sessions and lets you run several in parallel”: press Cmd+N on a Mac or Ctrl+N on Windows for another. In a Git project, “turn on Worktree before you start a session to run it in its own Git worktree.” It runs on Mac and Windows, with Linux in beta.

Price: included in Claude Pro, at $20 a month or $17 billed yearly, Max from $100, Team and Enterprise.

Watch for: “by default, Worktree is off and Claude works in the project folder itself,” so parallel sessions share one folder unless you turn it on for each. It runs only Claude.

Cloud sessions

Best for: long tasks that should keep going after you close your laptop.

A cloud session is “a Claude Code session that runs on cloud infrastructure instead of on your machine.” Start them at claude.ai/code, in the desktop app or the Claude phone app, or from a terminal, where “each --cloud command creates its own cloud session that runs independently”:

claude --cloud "Fix the flaky test in auth.spec.ts"
claude --cloud "Update the API documentation"

Each runs in its own virtual machine, so sessions can’t touch each other’s files, and you can pull one into your terminal later with claude --teleport.

Price: “Cloud sessions are available on Pro, Max, and Team plans, and for Enterprise users with premium seats,” with “no separate charge for the cloud VM.”

Watch for: cloud sessions “share rate limits with all other Claude and Claude Code usage within your account,” and “running multiple tasks in parallel consumes more rate limits proportionately.” They clone your repository from GitHub, not your local checkout, so push first; cloning and pull requests in Anthropic’s environments need GitHub.

Enjoy

Best for: running Claude Code next to Codex and other labs’ agents, across all your projects, without stopping when one plan runs out.

Enjoy runs Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, Antigravity, Muse Code, and local models through OpenCode, on Mac, Windows and Linux, on the AI plans you already have. Each conversation runs its own agent, so several work at once, and an agent can work in a worktree when you ask it to try something “in a new worktree.” What it adds:

• Switch agents mid-conversation. When Claude is the wrong fit or out of usage, Codex or another agent picks up the same conversation.
• Keep going through limits. When an agent runs out of usage, Enjoy switches to another of your accounts that still has usage, or waits for the limit to reset, then continues.
• Let an agent fan out the work. Ask “Start separate conversations to write the About page and the FAQ,” and an agent starts up to five conversations per request, with a link to each.
• See what needs you. The conversation list shows Working and Needs you for every conversation, and JOY watches all your projects at once.

Price: one monthly subscription, and the first seven days are free, with a card to start. It includes your phone, any browser and your other computers. See pricing.

Watch for: Enjoy isn’t open source, and it’s a subscription on top of your Claude plan once the free week ends. It doesn’t stop two conversations from editing the same files, so overlapping work needs a worktree, which you ask the agent for rather than switching on. Scheduled workflows run only while your computer is awake with Enjoy open. If you only use Claude, the desktop app does the core of this at no extra cost.

Orca

Best for: a free, open-source app for many agents side by side.

Orca, from Stably AI, is “the agent development environment”: “Run Claude Code, Codex, and any other coding agent in parallel, each in its own worktree.” Its homepage says it’s “Free and open source for macOS, Windows, and Linux,” and “every task runs in its own isolated git worktree.” It has a mobile companion for iOS and Android, and SSH worktrees to “run agents on a beefy remote box.”

Price: free.

Watch for: agents run on your computer or a machine you run yourself. Its ways to run page says “Orca does not sell managed VPS hosting,” and its cloud VM option, on your own provider’s account, is “labeled Cloud VM under Settings → Experimental.”

Conductor

Best for: Mac users who want a polished app for parallel Claude Code and Codex workspaces.

Conductor’s homepage says it lets you “create parallel Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor agents in isolated workspaces,” and its harnesses page adds OpenCode. Its free plan runs “multiple coding agents in parallel” with “local workspaces on your Mac” and your “own subscriptions and keys.”

Price: free; Pro is $50 a month, adding “Conductor Cloud and a bunch of cloud workspace hours,” multiplayer and its mobile app; Teams is $60 a user a month.

Watch for: “Conductor is not available for Windows or Linux yet.” For Windows, see the best app to run coding agents in parallel on Windows, and for more options, Conductor alternatives.

When Claude Code’s own tools are enough

If you only use Claude, you don’t need another app. Two or three terminals with claude --worktree cost nothing and isolate every session. Agent view adds one screen to watch them, the desktop app adds a sidebar and diffs, and cloud sessions keep going with your computer off, all on the plan you already pay for.

Reach for an app when you use more than one lab’s agent, when you want every project’s sessions in one place, or when you want work to carry on after one plan’s limit. And whichever way you pick, run only as many sessions as you can review: every result still needs checking.

How we compared

We read Anthropic’s Claude Code documentation, support article and pricing page, and each app’s homepage, pricing, installation and docs pages, on October 29, 2026, and every one is linked below. We quote their own words for the limits, and we don’t count features a maker hasn’t documented. Claude Code changes weekly, and agent view and agent teams are still previews, so we recheck this guide against its sources at least once a month, and the date at the foot of the page says when we last did.