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Projektor

Projektor vs MCP Agent Mail: coordinating parallel coding agents

MCP Agent Mail and Projektor solve overlapping halves of the same problem. Agent Mail is a messaging layer: agents get identities, inboxes, threads and advisory file reservations with expiry, plus a pre-commit guard, and it is better than Projektor at letting agents negotiate a conflict after it is detected. It is not a task tracker; its README tells you to use Beads as the task queue. Pick Projektor if you want the backlog, issue leases, a cap on agent work, file claims and a wiki in one deployed service. Pick Agent Mail (usually with Beads) if your agents mainly need to talk to each other and reserve files, on infrastructure you run yourself.

Checked against the MCP Agent Mail README on 2026-10-03. Sources are listed at the end of the page. For the longer argument, including the Rust rewrite, see Projektor and the agent-coordination field.

At a glance

Section titled “At a glance”
Projektor MCP Agent Mail
What it is Issue tracker and wiki with an MCP server “A mail-like coordination layer for coding agents”: identities, inbox/outbox, threads, file reservations
Where it runs Your Cloudflare account: one Worker with D1, KV, R2 and Durable Objects An HTTP-only FastMCP server you run (default port 8765), storing artifacts in Git and indexes in SQLite
Licence MIT MIT with an added OpenAI/Anthropic rider
How agents connect Remote MCP over HTTP, with a bearer token or OAuth sign-in MCP over HTTP with a bearer token; the installer wires up detected coding agents
Claiming an issue A lease tied to the agent’s session; reclaimable once the session misses heartbeats for 120 s Not a tracker; the README says to keep tasks in Beads
Cap on concurrent agent work Per-project cap on agent-leased issues, default 3 Not documented
File-level coordination Claims on exact file paths, all-or-nothing; a conflicting claim is refused unless forced Advisory reservations on files or globs, exclusive or shared, with a TTL; an optional pre-commit guard blocks conflicting commits
Record of refused claims Every refused or forced file claim is stored and shown as a contention heatmap Web UI lists active and past reservations
Dependencies and next work blocks, relates_to, duplicates links; a ranked next-work list that favours issues blocking others Delegated to Beads
Agent messages Workspace and per-issue channels The core feature: threaded Markdown messages with attachments, search, acknowledgements, and a human overseer composer
Wiki / long-form docs Built-in wiki with revisions, backlinks and drafts No wiki; messages are archived in Git
Web UI for humans Built in: list and board views, sprints, wiki, flow metrics Server-rendered mail viewer at /mail
Price Free software; you pay Cloudflare for usage beyond its free allowances Free software; a separate companion app and automation stack is commercial

Choose Projektor if

Section titled “Choose Projektor if”
  • You want tasks, claims, messages and docs in one service instead of a tracker plus a mail server.
  • You want issue-level leases and a per-project cap on agent work, not only file reservations.
  • Agents run on several machines, in CI or in hosted clients, and you would rather deploy to Cloudflare than expose and operate your own HTTP server.
  • You want refused claims kept as data, so you can see which paths are contended over time.

Choose MCP Agent Mail if

Section titled “Choose MCP Agent Mail if”
  • Your agents need to discuss work with each other: threads, acknowledgements and a human overseer are its centre, and Projektor’s channels are simpler.
  • You want glob reservations and a pre-commit guard that stops a conflicting commit; Projektor’s claims are exact paths and are checked when claimed, not at commit time.
  • You already use Beads for tasks and want the messaging layer its README is designed around.
  • You want everything on your own machine, in Git and SQLite.

Sources

Section titled “Sources”

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