Mastra vs loomcycle.

Mastra is a TypeScript framework for building AI agents and apps on Node, with a Helm chart for production self-host, Studio as the admin UI, and an Enterprise licence that gates the production RBAC and SSO. loomcycle is one ~80 MB Go binary that ships Decision, Teams-as-one-file state machines, whole-deployment Snapshots, memory, documents, bundled dev toolchain and a headless Chromium under one Apache-2.0 licence.

What each one is

Where they overlap

Both ship a durable workflow primitive with suspend/resume. Both route to many providers through one call shape. Both are MCP native on both the client and server sides. Both expose OpenTelemetry traces. Both have a browser-facing admin UI (Studio for Mastra; the loomcycle Web UI + LoomBoard for loomcycle). Both support schedules, webhooks and background tasks. If what you need is "an agent that runs a tool loop and remembers its last turn", either one will carry you.

Capability matrix

Rows marked ✦ are where loomcycle's answer is materially different from Mastra's. Some of those rows favour loomcycle, some favour Mastra; the mark flags a real divergence, not a value judgement.

Where Mastra fits better

Straightforward cases. Pick Mastra if:

• Your product is a Next.js, React or Hono app and you want the agent runtime to live inside it as an npm package rather than a separate process. Mastra is designed for this; loomcycle is a separate process by shape.
• Your team is TypeScript-first and will write agents, tools and workflows in TS. loomcycle's wire is identical in TS, but the primitives are authored in Go.
• You want a mature workflow-builder UI with datasets, scorers and a time-travel debugger right now. Mastra Studio is further along the UI road than LoomBoard.
• You want an established commercial tier ladder ($0 → $250 Teams cloud → custom Enterprise) and the counter-party is a venture-backed company. Mastra Inc. is that; loomcycle is maintained by one person with Apache-2.0 all the way down.
• Your approval surface is "a GitHub bot plus a Slack ping" and Mastra Factory does what you need as a product.

Where loomcycle fits better

Also straightforward. Pick loomcycle if:

• You want one binary. Not an npm package, not a Helm chart, not two Deployments and a Postgres. One ~80 MB Go binary, a config file, a SQLite file, and it serves HTTP + gRPC + MCP + WebSocket. Air-gapped machines and homelabs are first-class deployment targets.
• You want RBAC, SSO, multi-tenancy and token minting in the OSS build. loomcycle's tenant isolation, operator tokens, per-user token minting and declared principals are all under Apache-2.0, no commercial tier required.
• You want a Decision model as a general tool, not a classifier helper. The Decision primitive takes choice, noul or score questions and returns calibrated probabilities. Model aliases carry a kind tag so a chat model wired into a decision slot refuses config load with a named error.
• You want teams as a single file. A TeamDef declares nodes (agent, decision, parallel, consolidator), transitions, pushback edges and iteration caps in one declarative document. LoomBoard renders and runs it. Mastra's Agent Networks route at runtime via an LLM; the team graph lives in code, not data.
• You want a whole-deployment Snapshot that captures every def plus runtime state and restores on another box. Mastra's workflow time travel is per-workflow; loomcycle's snapshot is per-deployment with cred-scan at export.
• You want a bundled dev toolchain and headless Chromium so an agent can lint, test, build or scrape without the operator provisioning them per project.
• You care about memory quality with a published number. Bi-temporal + subject-document identity with LoCoMo 0.74; the reranker lift from a decision model is a published 0.588 → 0.740.

A quick note on the shipping cadence

Both projects ship often. Mastra released 15 minor versions of @mastra/core between September 3 and October 15, 2026; loomcycle released six minor versions in the same window (v1.106 through v1.111, with the Decision tool, Teams-as-one-file, team decision state, walk-aware sub-agents and whole-deployment Snapshots arriving across the wave). The release-note frequency is similar; the feature mix is different: Mastra invests in dev-rel surface (Factory, Studio, Harness GA), loomcycle invests in substrate primitives (Decision, TeamDef, Snapshot, bridges).

curl -L https://github.com/denn-gubsky/loomcycle/releases/latest/download/loomcycle-$(uname -s | tr A-Z a-z)-$(uname -m) -o loomcycle
chmod +x loomcycle
./loomcycle serve --config loomcycle.yaml