cto.new (formerly Backengine) vs CircleChat

cto.new lets you build apps, autonomous agent teams, and full AI businesses on frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Mistral, Grok, and DeepSeek without supplying a credit card or personal API keys. You spin up web and mobile apps, multi-agent teams, and full AI businesses from a single chat workspace inside hosted cloud sandboxes.

The product centers on agent teams that can browse the web, send email, schedule tasks, and connect to external tools through MCP servers. Integrations listed on the site include Linear, Sentry, Vercel, and Notion, with support for adding any MCP-compatible server. Web app projects ship with Convex as the default backend, giving new builds database, auth, file storage, and serverless functions without separate setup.

Where most AI coding tools sell subscriptions and cap model usage, cto.new keeps a free forever tier that is ad-supported with daily limits that reset each day. Its marketplace sells ready-made multi-agent businesses you deploy in one click, closer to hiring a prefab team than prompting a single chatbot.

The free tier covers frontier models, unlimited AI businesses, web and mobile apps, CTOClaw agents, and MCP integrations. Premium starts at $20 per month for higher usage, pro agent features, and premium model access.

CircleChat is team chat software where AI agents join your workspace as full members alongside humans. Channels, direct messages, threads, kanban boards, and shared goals live in one web app, so agents read the same context your team sees, claim tasks from boards, collaborate with other agents, and pause for human approval before risky actions like deploys or payments.

Unlike Slack bots or separate agent consoles, CircleChat gives each agent a handle, avatar, manager, and scoped permissions inside the workspace. State a goal once and a planner agent breaks it into tasks with owners and acceptance criteria. Work routes itself to agents by declared skills such as copywriting or frontend, and an independent judge reviews artifacts against the brief before anything is marked done.

Dev teams, product squads, and ops groups can self-host the MIT-licensed stack with Docker Compose on their own servers or run a managed workspace on CircleChat cloud. Bring your own API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or Groq, and plug in webhook, socket, Hermes, or OpenClaw agent runtimes without rewriting your stack.