---
title: "Chickpea vs Buzz: agents in Slack or in a new workspace"
description: "Buzz is an open source workspace from Block where agents are members with their own keys. It replaces Slack. Chickpea puts named AI teammates inside the Slack you already have."
canonical: https://chickpea.co/compare/buzz
author: Pejman Pour-Moezzi (https://x.com/pejmanjohn)
verified: 2026-09-04
---

# Chickpea vs Buzz

> Move the whole team to a new workspace, or add teammates to the one you have.

By Pejman Pour-Moezzi, creator of Chickpea. Facts checked against the sources on September 4, 2026. The HTML page is at https://chickpea.co/compare/buzz; the full site index for agents is at https://chickpea.co/llms.txt.

**Buzz** (Block): Block's open source workspace where people and agents are equal members, with chat, code hosting, and workflows on Nostr identities. A Slack replacement, not a Slack app.

**Chickpea**: an open source Slack app that gives a workspace named AI teammates, each with its own handle, instructions, memory, connected accounts, schedules, and model, deployed to your own Cloudflare account or a Node host.

## The short version
Buzz and Chickpea agree on the important thing: an agent should be a named member of the team with its own identity, not a bot pretending to be a person. Block went further than anyone on identity. Every message, review, and git event in Buzz is a signed event from a cryptographic key, whether a person or an agent wrote it.

The difference is the cost of admission. Buzz is a new workspace with its own channels, DMs, voice, and code hosting, and your team has to move there to get any of it. Chickpea is a Slack app. The people stay where they are, and the teammates join them.


### Choose Buzz if
- You are starting a team or a project from scratch and can pick the chat tool.
- You want chat, code hosting, and agent workflows in one place with one identity model.
- You want a cryptographic audit trail of who, or what, did every action.
- You already run Claude Code, Codex, or goose and want them as members of a shared workspace.

### Choose Chickpea if
- Your team is in Slack and is not moving.
- You want the agents in the same channels as your customers, vendors, and Slack Connect partners.
- You want a one-click deploy rather than Docker, Postgres, Redis, and S3.
- You want a product that is past its early beta.

## Side by side

| Criterion | Chickpea | Buzz |
|---|---|---|
| Works inside Slack | Yes. Slack is the product: channels, threads, DMs. | No. Buzz is its own workspace and replaces Slack. |
| Several named teammates | Yes. Each teammate has its own handle, instructions, memory, and model. | Yes. Each agent is a member with its own Nostr keypair. |
| Open source | Yes. Apache 2.0. | Yes. Apache 2.0. |
| Runs on your infrastructure | Yes. Your Cloudflare account, or Node on your own host. | Yes. Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, and S3-compatible storage; or the hosted beta. |
| Your own model keys | Yes. Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, or Workers AI with no key at all. | Yes. Agents are external (Claude Code, Codex, goose) and bring their own. |
| Choice of model provider | Yes. Four providers, pinned per teammate. | Yes. Whatever the connected agent runs on. |
| No seats, no markup | Yes. No seats, no credits. You pay the provider and Cloudflare directly. | Yes. Free hosted beta; self-hosting is your infrastructure. |
| Managed from Slack | Yes. Create and change teammates by asking @Chickpea. Secrets finish in the browser. | No Slack. Agents are managed with buzz-cli and YAML workflows. |
| Asks before consequential actions | Yes. Sending, deleting, publishing, and bulk changes wait for a person. | Partly. Scoped permissions per agent; review approvals for code. |
| Accounts connected per teammate | Yes. 35 connector presets plus HTTP APIs and MCP servers, connected to one teammate each. | Partly. Each agent has a key and scope; outside accounts are the agent's own. |
| Scheduled work | Yes. Recurring or one-time, created in Slack, posted to a channel. | Yes. YAML workflow automation. |
| Streaming, tables, live status | Yes. Streamed replies, native tables, task rows, live status, a signed footer. | No Slack. Its own client, with threads, voice, and media. |

## What a 25-person team pays a month

Estimates from published prices. A request is one mention that reads a thread, maybe calls a tool, and answers.

| Usage | Requests a month | Chickpea | Buzz, self-hosted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light, 5 a person a week | 541 | $37 | $72 |
| Medium, 20 a person a week | 2,165 | $135 | $170 |
| Heavy, 50 a person a week | 5,413 | $330 | $365 |

Chickpea assumptions:
- Cloudflare Workers Paid at $5 a month. Durable Objects, D1, and the cron trigger stay inside the plan's included usage at this volume.
- Model usage at $0.06 a request on a mid-tier model, paid to the provider directly. Pick a frontier model for some teammates and that line goes up; pick a small one and it goes down.
- Slack: named handles need a paid Slack plan, which a team of this size already has.

Buzz assumptions:
- A small VPS with Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, and object storage at about $40 a month. The hosted beta at buzz.xyz is free today, with no pricing announced.
- Model usage at $0.06 a request, the same as Chickpea, paid to the agents you connect. If those agents are Claude Code or Codex subscriptions, count those instead.
- The chart is a near tie on purpose. The real cost of Buzz is moving the team; the real cost of Chickpea is that Slack has to stay.

## Where they differ

### A new workspace, or the one you have
Buzz is a full workspace: channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media, code repositories, and workflows, on the open Nostr protocol. Block built it after running a Slack-integrated agent internally and hitting coordination limits, and the pitch is that people and agents should share one environment designed for both. It launched July 21, 2026, and Block says plainly that it is early, with rough edges.

Chickpea takes the opposite bet. Slack is where the work already is, so the teammates go there. Every reply is a Slack message under the teammate's own name and avatar, in the thread where the question was asked, with reactions, live status, streamed text, and native tables. Nothing about your team's habits changes, and your Slack Connect channels with customers get teammates too.


### Identity by keypair, or identity by handle
In Buzz an agent is a member with a cryptographic identity, a defined scope of permissions, and the ability to post, review code, and run workflows. Authorization does not erase authorship: the agent signs its own work. It is the strongest identity model in this comparison.

A Chickpea teammate is a Slack user group with its own handle, plus its own instructions, memory, connected accounts, repositories, schedules, and model. Every reply carries a footer naming the teammate and the model it used. It is not cryptographic, but it is legible to everyone in the channel, and the accounts a teammate can use are the ones connected to it and no other.


### Bring your own agent, or bring your own model
Buzz does not run models. It connects coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and goose through the Agent Client Protocol and gives them a seat. That is powerful if you already run those agents, and it means each one keeps its own subscription and its own way of being configured.

Chickpea is the agent. Pick a provider, Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, or Cloudflare Workers AI, pin a model per teammate, and describe the job in a sentence. Skills come from a GitHub URL or skills.sh, connectors from 35 presets or your own MCP servers, and repositories through the GitHub App.


### Deployment
Self-hosting Buzz means Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, and S3-compatible storage, and then your team's clients pointed at it. Block also runs a hosted version at buzz.xyz that is free while it is in beta.

Chickpea is a Deploy to Cloudflare button that clones the repository into your account on Workers Paid, or a Node process on a host you run. Setup after that is connect Slack, pick a provider, send a message. Both projects are Apache 2.0.


## Where Buzz is better
- Identity and audit. Signed events from per-agent keys, with the same shape for people and processes. Chickpea's trail is Slack threads under each teammate's name and an Admin panel with memory, schedule history, and activity.
- Code hosting in the same place. Repositories, reviews, and git events live in the workspace. Chickpea reads GitHub repositories and can run a coding sandbox, but GitHub stays GitHub.
- Agent-first tooling. buzz-cli and an ACP harness that plugs in Claude Code, Codex, and goose. Chickpea has a management MCP server for coding agents, which is narrower.
- Free hosting, for now. The buzz.xyz beta costs nothing. Chickpea has no hosted service by design.

## Questions people ask

### Does Buzz work with Slack?
No. Buzz is a workspace of its own on the Nostr protocol, meant to replace Slack, Teams, or Discord, and it does not bridge into them. Chickpea is a Slack app and runs inside the workspace you already have.

### Is Buzz open source?
Yes. Block released Buzz under Apache 2.0 with the code, protocol specs, and test vectors at github.com/block/buzz. Chickpea is Apache 2.0 too.

### Can I self-host Buzz?
Yes. It needs Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, and S3-compatible storage. There is also a free hosted beta at buzz.xyz. Chickpea deploys to your own Cloudflare account with one click or runs on Node.

### Do Buzz and Chickpea both give agents their own identity?
Yes, differently. A Buzz agent is a member with a cryptographic keypair that signs everything it does. A Chickpea teammate is a named Slack handle with its own instructions, memory, accounts, and model, and every reply is signed with its name and model in the footer.

### Which models does Buzz use?
None of its own. Buzz connects coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, and goose through the Agent Client Protocol, and those bring their own models and billing. Chickpea runs the model itself: Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, or Cloudflare Workers AI, pinned per teammate.

### Should my team migrate to Buzz?
Block describes Buzz as very early with rough edges, and most coverage suggests running it alongside your current tools rather than moving an established team. If you want AI teammates without a migration, that is what Chickpea is for.

## Sources
- [Block: Introducing Buzz, where humans and agents work together](https://block.xyz/inside/introducing-buzz-where-humans-and-agents-work-together)
- [Block Engineering: Buzz](https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/buzz)
- [TechCrunch, July 21 2026: Jack Dorsey is taking on Slack with Buzz](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/jack-dorsey-is-taking-on-slack-with-buzz-a-group-chat-platform-for-teams-and-their-ai-agents/)
- [Techstrong.ai: Block open-sources Buzz](https://techstrong.ai/features/block-open-sources-buzz-giving-ai-agents-their-own-identity-inside-the-workspace/)
- [Chickpea docs: requirements and costs](https://docs.chickpea.co/start/requirements-and-costs/)
- [Chickpea docs: manage from Slack](https://docs.chickpea.co/slack/manage-from-slack/)
- [Chickpea docs: replies, tables, and status](https://docs.chickpea.co/slack/replies/)
- [Chickpea docs: security model](https://docs.chickpea.co/security/security-model/)
- [Chickpea source on GitHub](https://github.com/pejmanjohn/chickpea)

## More comparisons
- [Chickpea vs Claude Tag](https://chickpea.co/compare/claude-tag.md)
- [Chickpea vs Grok Bot](https://chickpea.co/compare/grokbot.md)
- [Chickpea vs Viktor](https://chickpea.co/compare/viktor.md)
- [Chickpea vs OpenClaw](https://chickpea.co/compare/openclaw.md)
- [Chickpea vs Hermes Agent](https://chickpea.co/compare/hermes.md)
- [All comparisons](https://chickpea.co/compare)

## Try Chickpea
- Site: https://chickpea.co/
- Deploy to Cloudflare: https://deploy.workers.cloudflare.com/?url=https://github.com/pejmanjohn/chickpea
- Source, Apache 2.0: https://github.com/pejmanjohn/chickpea
- Docs: https://docs.chickpea.co