Berd
A free, open-source desktop app from Block (the company behind Square and Cash App) for managing AI agents across different models and tools from one workspace, instead of juggling separate chat windows for each provider.
🔗 Visit Berd
Description
Working with AI agents day-to-day often means switching between several tools — one window for a coding agent, another for a general chat model, another for a specific automation. Berd, open-sourced by Block, is built to be the single desktop workspace for that instead: it manages projects, skills, extensions, automations, and model providers in one place, so an engineer or product builder has a persistent "home base" for agent work rather than a scattered set of browser tabs.
Under the hood it runs on Tauri 2 and React 19 as a genuinely native app (not an Electron wrapper) across macOS, Windows, and Linux, and connects to Block's own Goose agent framework as its operational engine via an ACP WebSocket — Berd is the interface, Goose does the actual agent execution. It supports a portable "Agent Skills" framework for independently installable capability modules, and includes enterprise-oriented features like managed provider settings for organizations distributing their own configured builds.
💬 Our review
The short version: if you're already using or considering Block's Goose agent framework and want a proper desktop interface for it instead of a bare CLI, Berd is free, open-source, and purpose-built for that — with no catch since it's Apache 2.0 licensed.
Compared to Cursor, Windsurf, or GitHub Copilot — which are fundamentally code editors with an AI agent bolted in — Berd is closer to a general agent management workspace: it's not trying to be your IDE, it's trying to be the control panel for agents across multiple models and harnesses, coding or otherwise. The catch is contribution model, not cost: Block doesn't accept outside pull requests, so while you can inspect, build, and fork the code freely, you can't meaningfully shape the roadmap the way you could with a community-driven open-source project — you're a downstream user of Block's internal tool, not a co-maintainer.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Gratuit et open-source (licence Apache 2.0)
Pros
Gratuit et open-source (Apache 2.0)
App native (Tauri 2 + React 19), pas un wrapper Electron
Multi-plateforme : macOS, Windows, Linux
Framework de Skills portables et installables indépendamment
Cons
Ne remplace pas un IDE de code complet
Aucune PR externe acceptée — pas de gouvernance communautaire
Dépend du backend Goose pour l'exécution réelle des agents