Blacksmith vs Baton
Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right tool
Blacksmith
🔴Developerdeveloper-tools
High-performance managed runner platform for accelerating GitHub Actions workloads on purpose-built infrastructure.
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Starting Price
$0.004/minuteBaton
🔴Developerdeveloper-tools
A macOS menu bar app that tracks every Claude Code and Codex session on your machine and tells you which AI coding agent is waiting on you right now.
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Starting Price
$0 (self-hosted)Feature Comparison
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Blacksmith - Pros & Cons
Pros
- ✓Uses existing GitHub Actions workflow files and pull-request controls
- ✓Transparent per-minute rates and 3,000 free minutes support measurable pilots
- ✓ARM and Apple Silicon runners cover workloads unavailable on many basic CI services
Cons
- ✗Focused on GitHub Actions rather than heterogeneous CI environments
- ✗Advertised percentage savings depend on workload-specific speedups
- ✗Storage add-ons, static IPs, and enterprise concurrency can raise total cost
Baton - Pros & Cons
Pros
- ✓Free, open source (MIT), no telemetry, nothing leaves the machine
- ✓Sub-second updates via FSEvents; negligible CPU/battery cost
- ✓Handles both Claude Code and Codex in one unified view
- ✓Click-to-jump saves the biggest actual cost of multi-agent work: finding the right window
- ✓One-line install with an isolated venv — clean uninstall too
Cons
- ✗macOS only; no Linux or Windows menu bar equivalent
- ✗Requires Python 3.9+ on the host (3.11+ for Codex automation tracking)
- ✗Only tracks Claude Code and Codex — other coding agents (Cursor, Cline, Aider) not supported
- ✗No push notifications to phone / other devices; menu bar only
- ✗Read-only by design — cannot send input back to sessions
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