Otto or the terminal: which door should you use?

The two names first, because they trip up almost everyone. Otto is the app you install on your computer. Booked Solid is the brain inside it. There are two front doors to that same brain: the Otto app, or typing to Claude in a terminal. Same brain, same booking folder, same skills. What differs is the door, not the intelligence.

So when someone asks "should I use Otto or the terminal", they are not asking which one is smarter. They are asking which door suits them.

Use the Otto app if

• You want to see your business, not just read about it. The pipeline board, the money view and the Brain tab only exist in the app. You can drag a lead from one stage to the next.
• You want guardrails. The app is tuned so a normal working day fits inside a Claude Pro plan at about $20 a month, and it stops runaway work before it burns your whole window.
• You want us to be able to help you. When something breaks in the app you can send us that exact run with one tap, and we can see what happened. What you do in your own terminal is invisible to us, which is good for privacy and bad for support.
• You are not especially technical. Everything is a screen and a button.

Use the terminal if

• You are comfortable in a terminal already and you like it there.
• You want the most battle-tested connection layer. Claude's own terminal is used by an enormous number of people, so its connectors and integrations have been hammered on far harder than ours have.
• You want to go off the map: your own scripts, your own tools, your own way of working, without waiting for us to build a screen for it.

You do not actually have to choose

Both doors open onto the same booking folder. You can run the app most days and drop into the terminal when you want to do something unusual. Nothing has to be exported or moved between them.

Your House Rules travel with you. Set a rule in the app and the terminal follows it. Teach a rule in the terminal by adding it to _config/house-rules.md in your booking folder, and Otto follows it on its next message. There is nothing to export and no restart.

What is honestly better in each one

The app is younger. It has a few hundred people using it, so it still has rough edges we are finding and fixing weekly. The terminal is more robust today, especially when connecting to outside services. The app is where every new visual feature lands, and it is the path we are building on.

Our recommendation for most performers is the app, because the guardrails and the visual pipeline are worth more day to day than the extra robustness, and because when you hit a bug in the app we can actually see it and fix it for everyone.

Common ways people ask this

• Should I use the app or the terminal?
• Is the terminal version being abandoned?
• What is the difference between Otto and Booked Solid?
• Is Otto the app or the brain?
• Do I lose anything by using the app instead of the terminal?

Still not sure? Open a ticket at support.booked.kivimedia.co and tell us how you like to work. We will give you a straight answer rather than a sales one.