Murmell Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

Murmell is a browser canvas where several AI coding agents run on one cloud machine, share a project directory and keep working after you shut your laptop. We found the file-reservation system the real product and the one-project cap the real limit. Best for: small teams running parallel agents. Price: From $39/mo (free plan: no). Rating: 7.0/10.

What is Murmell?

Murmell is a shared cloud workspace for AI coding agents. You open a canvas in the browser, spawn Claude Code, Codex, Kimi, Cursor Agent or OpenCode into their own windows, and they all work on the same project directory on the same machine. Everyone you send the link to sees the same terminals, the same cursors and the same live preview while it happens. Because the machine is Murmell’s rather than yours, closing the laptop does not kill the run.

It launched on Product Hunt on 1 September 2026 with the tagline “Google docs for AI agents, and you can close your laptop” and took 72 upvotes. This is the second launch; the first was on 3 August 2026. The product is published by Intrudr, based in Paris, and hosted on Microsoft Azure in the France Central region, both of which are stated on the legal notice page rather than left to guesswork. The makers are Moss’Ab Mirande-Ney, who is 19, and Omar Farouk Lasfar.

The problem statement on the homepage is unusually concrete for a launch page, and it is the reason to take the product seriously. Two agents, one file, no rules. The agent dies with your laptop. Four clones, and a Friday of merges. Anyone who has tried to run three coding agents at once has hit all three, and the usual answer is git worktrees plus a lot of discipline.

What are Murmell’s key features?

File reservations enforced by the machine

This is the feature that justifies the product. Before an agent writes to a path, it claims that path. One holder per path, and the board refuses everybody else until it is released. A watcher attributes every write back to whoever made it, and a colliding write is snapshotted before it lands.

The important word in Murmell’s own description is “enforced by the machine rather than suggested to the model.” Prompt-level coordination between agents does not survive contact with a long run, because the model that is told to stay in its lane is the same model that decides what its lane is. Moving the lock down to the filesystem is the correct design, and the canvas showing zero collisions across four agents is the demo that sells it.

Agents that keep running with the lid shut

Every canvas runs on its own machine, separate from every other project Murmell hosts, and the machine that executes agent code holds no database and no decryption key. The workspace is disposable and gets torn down; the work is pushed to a private GitHub repository created with the project before that happens. A sleeping canvas wakes where it stopped, and hours are not metered.

The unmetered part matters more than it looks. Cloud agent products usually meter compute minutes, which turns every long-running task into a cost decision. Murmell charges for the room instead, so leaving four agents grinding overnight costs the same as leaving them idle.

A canvas anyone can watch without an account

Share the link and anyone can watch a running canvas: no signup, no seat, uncapped, free. On Pro and above, collaborators can also edit, driving their own agents in the same room with cursor presence and no refresh needed to stay in step. There is one catch stated in small print under the pricing table: watching a live canvas needs no account, but opening one that has been turned off needs Pro.

Your own model accounts, not resold tokens

Murmell does not sell you tokens. You connect the agent subscriptions and API keys you already pay for, and the company charges for the machines and the collaboration only. That is the honest arrangement, and it also means the sticker price is not the bill. A Pro canvas at $69 a month still needs your Claude, OpenAI or Moonshot spend on top, so budget the two together.

How much does Murmell cost?

Murmell starts at $39 a month. Solo is $39, Pro is $69 and Builder is $149, all billed monthly, with a year costing ten months’ price, so the annual discount is 16.67% or two months free. During launch week every tier is half price and locked at that rate for as long as you stay, which puts Solo at $19.50, Pro at $34.50 and Builder at $74.50. There is no free plan. Pro opens with a 48-hour free trial that takes a card; Solo and Builder are charged the moment checkout completes.

What you get for the money is agent windows, collaborators and projects. Solo buys five agent windows, one project and a canvas nobody else can enter. Pro buys ten windows, ten people editing and a shareable canvas, still on one project. Builder buys fifteen windows, twenty-five people, three projects, canvases owned by the team rather than by whoever made them, and early access to new features.

Read the ladder by project rather than by feature and it changes shape. Solo and Pro both cap at one project, so the $30 step from Solo to Pro buys sharing and five more windows, not more work in flight. Builder is the only plan where the per-project cost falls, to $49.67 against Pro’s $69. If you run more than one codebase, the middle plan is the expensive one and the top plan is the value one, which is the reverse of how these ladders usually read.

Against the obvious rival the per-seat maths is stark. Conductor charges $50 a month for Pro and $60 per user per month on Teams. Murmell charges per canvas, so four people collaborating cost $69 total on Pro against $240 on Conductor Teams. That is the single strongest number on Murmell’s pricing page, and the page does not make the comparison itself.

The trial policy is backwards. The only plan with a free trial is Pro. Solo, the cheapest tier and the one a curious developer is most likely to buy on impulse, charges immediately, and so does the $149 Builder plan. Forty-eight hours is also short for a tool whose value only shows up across a week of real work with real agents.

Who is Murmell best for?

Use Murmell if you already run two or more coding agents in parallel and have lost work to a merge conflict or a closed laptop. The file reservation system is the answer to a problem you will recognise instantly if you have had it, and it is worth $39 a month on its own to stop paying for it in Friday afternoons. Use it too if you pair remotely and want a second person watching an agent run without installing anything or holding a seat.

Use it if your team is small and your budget is per project rather than per head. Ten editors for $69 is priced for a startup, not for an enterprise seat count.

Skip Murmell if you work on several repositories at once, unless you go straight to Builder, because one project is a hard cap on two of the three plans. Skip it if your employer will not allow source code on a two-person vendor’s machines: the terms describe an early service with no uptime guarantee, the company is a small Paris operation, and your code plus your agent credentials both live inside the workspace. And skip it if you were hoping to try before paying, because unless you pick Pro there is nothing to try.

Best Murmell alternatives

Conductor is the closest thing to a direct competitor. It has a real free tier, Pro at $50 a month with cloud workspaces included, and Teams at $60 per user per month with live shared workspaces and an admin portal. It wins on maturity and on having a free plan at all. It loses badly on price the moment more than one person needs to be in the room, because Murmell’s collaborators are included and Conductor’s are billed.

Cursor is the alternative if what you want is agents rather than a shared cloud room. Free to start, $20 a month for Pro, $40 per user on Teams, with background agents and a mature editor around them. It is a better daily driver and a worse answer to the multi-agent collision problem, because coordination between parallel agents is still yours to manage.

Git worktrees and tmux remain the free option and deserve a mention because plenty of people will read this and correctly decide they already have a solution. Separate worktrees give each agent its own directory and eliminate collisions by construction. What you give up is the shared room, the live preview, the persistence after you disconnect, and the part where a colleague can watch without setting anything up.

Final verdict: is Murmell worth it?

Murmell is a sharp answer to a problem that got real about a year ago and still has no standard solution. Enforcing file claims at the machine rather than in the prompt is the right call, the canvas is a better mental model for parallel agents than four terminal tabs, and charging for the room instead of metering compute minutes means you can leave the work running without watching a meter. The pricing is honest in a way that is becoming rare: the FAQ names the real $39, $69 and $149 prices in plain text while the cards show the launch discount, so nobody finds out the true rate at renewal.

The reservations are about scale, not about the idea. Two makers are running machines that hold your source code and your agent credentials, under terms that state there is no uptime guarantee, and the trial that would let you test that is available on exactly one of three plans. The one-project cap on Solo and Pro will push anyone with more than one repository straight to $149, which is a lot for a product this young. Buy it at the launch price if you run agents in parallel every day and can live with a single project. Wait for a free tier and a longer trial if you cannot.