Codeaton vs. Beacon: two takes on ambient agent status
Beacon and Codeaton are the two apps making the same bet: that you want ambient status, not a remote control. Beacon leads with MCP and a card-based feed that any agent can post to. Codeaton leads with several named agents across several machines, summarized in one Live Activity.
If your agents already speak MCP and you want them posting rich, arbitrary cards — checklists, log tails, questions with answer buttons — Beacon’s model is more expressive than Codeaton’s fixed status vocabulary.
| Feature | Codeaton | Beacon |
|---|---|---|
| Core idea | Named agents with live states | Cards an agent posts to a feed |
| Connection | Hooks + HTTP ingest | MCP server, OAuth or token |
| Multi-agent rollup | One Live Activity for every agent | Per-agent cards |
| Answer back | Waiting state surfaces the ask | Tap-to-answer from the notification |
| Usage analytics | Token leaderboards | Renders metrics an agent posts |
| Web dashboard | Full dashboard with pairing + keys | App-first |
| iOS floor | iOS 17+ | iOS 26 |
Same bet, different shape
Most apps in this space — Happy Coder, Omnara, Paseo — sell remote control: steer your agent, approve diffs, send prompts from your phone. Beacon and Codeaton are the two that instead bet on ambient status. That makes Beacon the most direct comparison Codeaton has, and worth being straight about.
What Beacon does well
Beacon is an MCP server first. Any agent that speaks MCP connects over OAuth or a personal access token and can post cards — progress bars, metrics, checklists, questions, log tails — which the app renders across widgets, notifications and Live Activities. Its two-way question flow is genuinely good: an agent can ask something and get a tapped answer back from the notification without you unlocking the phone.
That expressiveness is the trade. Beacon lets an agent say almost anything. Codeaton deliberately does not.
What Codeaton does differently
Codeaton has a small, fixed vocabulary — working, waiting, done, failed, plus a message and a progress number — and builds everything on top of that constraint. Because every agent reports the same four states, the app can summarize every agent in one line: “3 agents working.” One glance answers “is anything waiting on me?” across every machine you own.
It also means connecting something takes one HTTP call. There is no protocol to adopt if you do not want one, which matters when the thing you want to watch is a shell script or a CI job rather than an MCP-speaking agent.
Which to pick
- Pick Beacon if your agents speak MCP, you want rich arbitrary cards, and tap-to-answer questions are the feature you care about most.
- Pick Codeaton if you run several agents across several machines and want one summarized status you can read in half a second, or if you want to wire up something that is not an MCP client.
- Both are worth trying. They are small apps solving a problem that barely existed eighteen months ago, and the category is young enough that neither answer is settled.
Other comparisons
Codeaton vs. ntfy
ntfy turns a curl call into a push notification. Codeaton turns an agent into a live status you can glance at. Here is the honest difference, including when ntfy is the better choice.
Codeaton vs. Happy Coder
Happy Coder puts a full Claude Code and Codex session on your phone. Codeaton puts the status on your Lock Screen. They solve different problems — here is which one you want.
Put your agents on your island.
Pair in a minute, wire up one HTTP call, and stop tabbing back to your terminal to see if anything happened.