Short answer
Paseo is an Apache-2.0 open source "agentic development environment". A local server called the daemon runs on your machine, and the desktop app puts agent chats, an editor, terminals, diffs, pull requests and a browser in one window. You can run many agents at once, each in its own git worktree, and agents can launch and talk to other agents. The mobile app is a full native client for iOS and Android.
The biggest difference with BotBus is the division of labor. Paseo wants to replace your IDE: you start, manage and review every agent inside it. BotBus leaves your desktop workflow alone. You keep starting sessions in the terminal, the Codex app or the Claude desktop app, and BotBus runs in the background and brings those sessions to your phone and Apple Watch, so you can check progress, approve requests and follow up when you're away from your desk. If you want a desktop workbench for orchestrating many agents, care about open source and plugins, or want to host the relay yourself, stay with Paseo. If you're happy with your current desktop tools and only need to cover the "I'm away and the agent is waiting" gap, BotBus is worth a look.
Everything about Paseo below comes from its GitHub repository (getpaseo/paseo, v0.11.2 at the time), the download page on paseo.sh and its official docs, checked on October 12, 2026. It ships fast, so treat its site as the source of truth.
What Paseo looks like today
Architecture. The daemon manages agent processes on your laptop, a Mac mini, a VPS or a Docker container. The desktop app, mobile app, web app and CLI are all clients of that daemon. The desktop app starts a local daemon for you; on a headless server you install the CLI with npm install -g @getpaseo/cli and run paseo, and there are Nix and Docker options too.
Platforms. The download page lists macOS 13 or newer (Apple Silicon and Intel, also via Homebrew), Windows (x64 and ARM64), Linux (AppImage, DEB, RPM), apps on the App Store and Google Play, and a web client. As of the check date there's no watch app.
Agents. Built-in adapters for Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Antigravity and Muse Code, plus an ACP catalog with one-click installs for Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Hermes, goose, Kimi and dozens more. You install and sign in to each agent yourself; Paseo runs it on your existing subscription or API key and, per its docs, adds no charge.
Features. Parallel agents in separate worktrees and branches; orchestration, where agents create worktrees, launch other agents and message them; an editor, terminals, diffs, PR creation and a built-in browser on desktop, in split panes; dictation and a voice mode with local speech recognition by default; a plugin system for UI, agent lifecycle and new providers; a TypeScript SDK and CLI for automation; and Import session, which pulls in sessions you started in Claude Code, Codex and other tools so you can continue them in Paseo. There's also Paseo Hub, an optional hosted service (also self-hostable) that triggers agents on your machines from GitHub, Slack or Discord events.
Connecting a phone. Three options: the official relay (daemon and phone both connect out, no open ports), a direct TCP connection, or SSH and VPNs like Tailscale. According to its security docs the relay is end-to-end encrypted: the pairing QR code carries the daemon's public key, the two sides do a Curve25519 key exchange and encrypt with XSalsa20-Poly1305, and the relay sees only IP addresses, timing, message sizes and session IDs. The relay itself is open source (getpaseo/paseo-relay). On the phone you get agents, files, terminals, diffs and push notifications.
Price and license. Apache-2.0, no required account, and the project says it has no telemetry. Development is funded by sponsors and the optional hosted Hub.
When Paseo is the better choice
These are real strengths that BotBus doesn't match today:
- A desktop workbench for many agents. Editor, diffs, PRs and a browser in one window, for people who treat agents as their main way of working and push several tasks at once. On the computer, BotBus is just a menu bar or background app with no editor or PR flow.
- Agent-to-agent orchestration. One agent plans, another implements, a third reviews: Paseo has this built in. BotBus doesn't let agents dispatch work to each other.
- Open source, plugins, an SDK. You can read and change all of it, write a plugin once and get it on desktop, web and mobile, and build your own dashboards on the SDK. BotBus's apps are closed; the protocol, connectors and test fixtures are public, and there's no plugin system or public SDK.
- Your choice of network path. You can skip the official relay entirely and connect directly, over SSH or through Tailscale, or run the relay yourself. BotBus always goes through our relay.
- Older Macs and a web client. Paseo's desktop app runs on macOS 13 and later; BotBus for Mac needs macOS 26 or later. Paseo also has a web app for any browser.
- More agents out of the box. Paseo's ACP catalog lists dozens of one-click agents. BotBus can connect ACP agents too, but apart from OpenCode they haven't been individually tested.
If any of those is a hard requirement, Paseo is the right tool.
How BotBus is different
Your existing sessions, no new workspace
Paseo's model is to move your work into Paseo: its daemon starts sessions, and older ones can be imported. BotBus works the other way around. It runs in the background and picks up the sessions you already start. For Codex it reads the local session data under ~/.codex read-only. For Claude Code, install the hooks once in BotBus settings; after that, sessions you open in the terminal or the Claude desktop app, along with their permission prompts, show up on the phone. Your desktop tools don't change, and the session is where you left it when you sit back down. You can continue a desktop session on your phone, and sessions started from the phone can be picked up on the Mac from the menu bar with the agent's own resume command.
A watch, and actions from notifications
Both have native phone apps and push. BotBus adds Apple Watch: the watch app syncs pairing from the iPhone and then connects on its own, so you can see tasks, approve requests, answer multiple-choice questions and dictate follow-ups from your wrist. See Apple Watch for AI coding agents. Notifications only fire when an agent needs an approval, needs a reply, finishes or fails, and whether they arrive depends on the permissions you grant. The iPhone and Apple Watch apps are on the App Store, and the Android app is out too.
Control the computer's screen
Both let you browse files and open a terminal from the phone. On a Mac, BotBus also shows the live screen and lets you tap and type, which helps when an agent is stuck on a system permission dialog, a simulator or a browser. The Mac version can also share a local dev server to the phone, see previewing localhost on your iPhone. As of the check date, Paseo's docs say its built-in browser runs in the desktop app and don't mention controlling the computer's screen from the phone.
A different set of built-in agents
BotBus has built-in support for Codex, Claude Code, Hermes, Pi, OpenClaw and DeepSeek Harness, and any ACP agent (OpenCode, for example) can be connected, see connecting an agent. The overlap with Paseo is Codex, Claude Code, Pi and OpenCode. OpenClaw and DeepSeek Harness weren't on Paseo's supported list as of the check date, and Antigravity and Muse Code aren't built into BotBus.
Worktrees from the phone, but no orchestration
When you start a session from the phone, BotBus can run it in a git worktree and later squash the whole session into one commit on the original branch, all from the phone. You can switch model and reasoning effort when following up, and turn on auto-approve for a project, see auto-approving agent requests safely. That's for one person juggling a few things from a phone, not Paseo-style multi-agent collaboration.
Side by side
| Paseo (checked 2026-10-12) | BotBus | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Desktop agent environment + clients everywhere | Background app on the computer + phone and watch remote |
| Where sessions come from | Started by the Paseo daemon; existing sessions can be imported | Picks up sessions you start as usual; can also start them from the phone |
| Computer | macOS 13+, Windows, Linux; servers via npm / Nix / Docker | macOS 26 or later, Linux (x86_64 / aarch64), Windows 10 / 11 |
| Phone and watch | iOS, Android, web; no watch app | iOS 26, Apple Watch (watchOS 26), Android 8.0 or later |
| Network path | Official relay (self-hostable), direct, SSH, VPN | Official relay only; no inbound port on the computer |
| Encryption | Relay traffic end-to-end encrypted | Content end-to-end encrypted, except dev previews |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apps closed; protocol and connectors public |
Can you use both, and how to switch
Yes, as long as you're clear about which app owns which session. A natural split: run the tasks you want to orchestrate and review on desktop inside Paseo, and follow them with Paseo's own mobile app; leave the sessions you open directly in the terminal or the Codex and Claude desktop apps to BotBus, with the watch on top. Two caveats:
- Paseo runs Claude Code through the Claude Agent SDK and Codex through
codex app-server. BotBus's Claude hooks live in Claude Code'ssettings.json. We haven't tested whether Claude sessions started by Paseo fire those hooks or which side an approval lands on, so handle approvals for a given session in one place only. - Both read the local Codex and Claude session history, so the same session may appear in both apps. Only follow up from one side at a time, so two processes don't write to the same session.
To move to BotBus:
- Install the desktop app from the download section, install BotBus on your phone and scan the pairing QR code on the computer.
- Install the Claude Code hooks in BotBus settings. Codex needs no extra setup.
- For tasks still open in Paseo, resume them in the agent's own CLI (for example
claude --resumeorcodex resume) and they'll show up in BotBus like any other session.
Limits
- What you can do depends on the connector and task state. Some tasks are view-only. Approving, continuing, starting and stopping all need the computer online and an agent that supports the action.
- Your computer has to be on. BotBus manages agents on your own machine; if it sleeps or shuts down, so does the agent. See keeping your Mac awake for agents.
- Not a development environment. You can review uncommitted changes, browse files and use a terminal from the phone, but there's no editor, PR flow or agent orchestration like Paseo's.
- Some features are Mac-only. The live screen and dev previews exist only on the Mac version; on Linux and Windows, Control computer gives you files and a terminal.
- Sending photos is limited. Sending images from the phone to an agent currently works with Codex and Claude Code only.
- Closed source, no self-hosted relay. The server can see device IDs, online status, update times and data sizes; details are in the security docs. If that matters to you, Paseo fits better.
FAQ
Does Paseo have a mobile app?
Yes. As of October 12, 2026, Paseo has native apps on the App Store and Google Play, and the project describes the mobile app as a full client with agents, files, terminals and diffs. There's no Apple Watch app.
Are Paseo and BotBus both end-to-end encrypted?
According to their own docs, both encrypt content end to end through the relay, and the relay only sees connection metadata. The difference is that Paseo's relay is optional and self-hostable, while BotBus always uses its own relay and dev previews are outside end-to-end encryption.
I already use Paseo. Do I need BotBus?
If all your sessions start in Paseo and you don't need a watch, Paseo's own mobile app covers you. Consider BotBus if you want sessions you open directly in the terminal or the Claude and Codex desktop apps on your phone too, one-tap approvals on your wrist, or control of your Mac's screen from the phone.
Can BotBus make agents work together like Paseo does?
No. BotBus handles several agents and several computers at once and can start worktree sessions from the phone, but it won't have one agent launch or direct another. For other approaches, see the Happy Coder alternative and the Claude Code UI (CloudCLI) alternative.