Six agents. Six full context loads. Or one index, six efficient agents.
Token Intelligence is Tempest's core feature: a local knowledge graph built once, shared across every parallel agent session — up to 86% fewer tokens, up to 92% fewer tool calls. Emdash has no documented equivalent. Both tools are free, open-source, and local-first — Emdash pulls ahead on SSH remote execution, CI monitoring, file editing, issue tracker integration, and scheduling.
| Feature | Tempest | Emdash |
|---|---|---|
| Shared knowledge graph | Yes — indexed once, shared across all agents | I did not find an equivalent documented |
| Token efficiency | Up to 86% fewer | I did not find equivalent claims |
| Fewer tool calls | Up to 92% fewer | I did not find equivalent claims |
| Git worktree isolation | Per agent session | Yes |
| Parallel agents | Unlimited | Yes — 25+ agents supported |
| Windows support | Yes | Yes |
| macOS support | Yes | Yes |
| Linux support | Build from source today | Yes |
| SSH / remote execution | No | Yes — run agents on remote machines via SSH |
| Built-in browser preview | Yes — live dev server preview | Yes |
| File editor | No | Yes — with search and recovery |
| CI monitoring | No | Yes |
| PR inspection | Stage, commit, push built-in | Yes — PR inspection interface |
| Issue tracker integration | No | Yes — Linear, Jira, GitHub, Notion, Asana |
| Recurring agent runs | No | Yes |
| Prompt library | Yes — built-in + custom | — |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Open source (specific license on GitHub) |
| Price | Free | Free |
Emdash details based on public docs at emdash.ai, reviewed 2026-07-25. If anything is wrong or outdated, open an issue on our GitHub and we will fix it.
Two honest recommendations.
Pick Emdash
Full IDE surface: editor, CI, PRs, integrations.
Pick Emdash if you want the fuller development environment: a file editor, CI monitoring, PR inspection, issue tracker integrations with Linear and Jira, SSH remote execution on a dev box, and scheduled recurring agent runs. It ships more surface area than Tempest in almost every direction.
Pick Tempest
Your API bill is the constraint.
Without Token Intelligence, every agent you run in parallel pays the full file-read cost independently — that cost scales linearly with session count. Token Intelligence indexes your repository once. Every agent draws from that shared graph instead. Up to 86% fewer tokens, up to 92% fewer tool calls.
More agents shouldn't mean more tokens per agent. A shared index breaks that relationship.
The one thing Emdash doesn't have
Emdash is genuinely feature-rich. But each agent session still reads your repository independently. Tempest builds one shared knowledge graph and every session draws from it — that's where the 86% token reduction comes from. It compounds as you add parallel agents.
Both local-first, different defaults
Emdash runs locally and adds SSH remote execution as an option. Tempest is local-only by design — no remote path means there's nothing to configure, nothing to secure, nothing to connect. For teams that stay on-machine, that's fewer moving parts.
Nothing leaves your machine
Tempest has no outbound path for your code. The knowledge graph, your sessions, and every agent interaction stay on your local disk. It's not a policy — it's the architecture.