Routines vs Managed Agents: where recurring Claude work should live (opens in new tab)

Anthropic shipped Claude Code Routines in April and Managed Agents scheduled deployments in June 2026. Same question — "run this on a cron" — but different billing (subscription vs $0.08/session-hour + tokens), identity (you vs service account), and schedule granularity. I wrote a side-by-side for solo devs choosing between personal Routines and platform cron, plus when you still need external orchestration for multi-step workflows with human gates. Full comparison table and decision matrix o...