Difference between Local agents and Remote Agents

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Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.

Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Local agents were deprecated in Bamboo 8.0. In all versions of Bamboo 9.6 and above, they will no longer function.


A Bamboo Agent is a service that provides capabilities to run job builds. There are two types of Bamboo Agents:

1 - Local Agents actually run as part of the Bamboo server. Local Agents run in the server's process, i.e. run as separate threads in the same JVM as the Bamboo server.

2 - Remote Agents run on computers, other than the Bamboo server, that run the Remote Agent tool. Each Remote Agent runs in its own separate process, i.e. has its own JVM, and use JMS to communicate with Bamboo server.

Each Agent has a defined set of capabilities and can only run builds for jobs whose requirements match the Agent's capabilities. 

So there are some good reasons why you'd want to use Remote Agents, for example:

  • When the Bamboo server JVM resources are limited.
  • When the Agent needs capabilities that are not available on the Bamboo Server.

Then in terms of the number of Agents to use, it will all come down to how many tasks you'd want to execute in parallel because 1 Agent can only execute 1 task at a time.

So if you are going to build and test sequentially, then you will be fine with just 1 Agent. You can in fact have many Agents installed in multiple computers; only the Agent running needs to be licensed. But as soon as you'd want to run multiple build and tests at the same time, then you will want to use as many Agents accordingly.


For complementary information, have a look at our pages on Bamboo Agents and Bamboo Best Practice - Using Agents.


DescriptionA Bamboo Agent is a service that provides capabilities to run job builds. There are two types of Bamboo Agents – Local Agents actually run as part of the Bamboo server, and Remote Agents run on computers, other than the Bamboo server, that run the Remote Agent tool.
Last modified on Mar 7, 2024

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