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Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

Agent Zero vs Paseo

Paseo scores 62.1 (B) on agent readiness against Agent Zero's 46 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Agent Zero leads on reliability. Both do agent harnesses.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 1500 harnesses comparisons

Agent ZeroAgent Zero, s.r.o. · Agent harness D46/100#1168 of 1486 PaseoMohamed Boudra · Agent harness B62.1/100#575 of 1486

Which one, for what

Agent Zero D

Best for A technical owner who wants an agent with its own Linux machine, reachable from Telegram, WhatsApp or email, with scheduled tasks and editable memory.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 57 against 50

Watch for

No approval step before shell commands, file changes or outgoing messages. Tool Access defaults to allow

Paseo B

Best for Developers who want parallel coding agents on their own machines with no telemetry, reachable from anywhere.

Ahead on

  • Agent ergonomics, 70 against 62

Also in its favour

  • No incidents deducted, where Agent Zero loses 15 points for them

Watch for

Pre-1.0, at 0.15.3

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Agent ergonomics Paseo +8

Agent Zero 62

Harness reading, scored on what a person or program driving it must supply. Skills load on demand, blocked tools are removed from the prompt, chats can be compacted, and the v2.12 notes report Codex input falling from about 16.4K to 11.3K tokens, a vendor figure (18 of 25). An MCP tool timeout of 120 seconds, a limit of five consecutive unusable responses and context-window handling are set by default. No turn or spend limit was found in the reviewed docs (11 of 20). Other programs reach it through POST /api_message, an optional MCP server, A2A and an ACP bridge, with request and response shapes left to the source (11 of 20). An error-retry plugin, saved chats, a message queue, backups and Time Travel snapshots with diff and revert (14 of 20). One Docker command starts it and a wizard sets the model, but there is no SDK and the default has no login (8 of 15).

Paseo 70

Harness reading. A self-hosted daemon that agents can use to create worktrees, launch other agents and talk to them, scriptable from the CLI (70).

Reliability Agent Zero +7

Agent Zero 57

Read with the local-software lines, as software the owner runs. Installs from the agent0ai/agent-zero Docker image, an install script, or a desktop Launcher with builds for macOS, Linux and Windows on x86 and ARM64. The README says it runs wherever Docker runs. The image registry page was not read (17 of 20). The repository holds 245 files under tests/ on 4 November, and its only two workflows still publish Docker images and close inactive issues. The publish workflow runs no tests, so no public CI run shows them passing (5 of 25, a partial kept). 139 open issues and pull requests on 12 October 2026, per that check (GitHub's pages and API weren't read on 4 November). Open reports from September include a crash of run_ui after a failed memory consolidation (#1909), a browser worker that hangs the agent turn (#1923) and truncated backups (#1904), each with no reply or one, and a workflow closes anything inactive for 90 days (11 of 25). Release notes for v2.11, v2.12 and v2.13 carry a Breaking Changes section, but breaking changes ship in minor versions, so the numbering is not semver (9 of 15). v2.15, past 1.0 (15).

Paseo 50

Local software. Desktop builds, an Android APK, a Docker image and a Nix package (20). ci.yml on the repository; pass state not read (15). GitHub issues and pull requests weren't read (GitHub's pages refuse these sessions), so that line is scored absent (0). CHANGELOG.md (15). Version 0.15.3 (0). 20 + 15 + 0 + 15 + 0 = 50.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAgent ZeroPaseoEdge
Reliability16%205750Agent Zero +7
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26465Paseo +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.26270Paseo +8
Security & auth14%17.55458Paseo +4
Payments & pricing10%12.56060even
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87575even
Transparency & trust7%8.86468Paseo +4
Negative events≤15-150
TotalD 46/100B 62.1/100

Facts side by side

FactAgent ZeroPaseo
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorAgent Zero, s.r.o.Mohamed Boudra
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-11-012026-11-07
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Popularity19k starsnone

How the scores have moved

Agent Zero

Paseo

No score change since it was listed.

Verdicts

Agent Zero

Self-hosted under the MIT licence, with seven releases from 12 August to 1 November 2026 and breaking changes listed in minor-release notes. The agent runs shell commands in its container with no approval step, the web interface has no login by default, and eight CVEs from the past year were published by third parties with no vendor advisory.

Paseo

A self-hosted, open-source workspace for running many coding agents on your own machines, scriptable from the CLI and reachable from phone, web or desktop, with no telemetry or forced log-in. It's pre-1.0 and run largely by one maintainer.

Before you call either

Agent Zero

  1. Set a UI login and password in Settings before publishing the port or opening a tunnel. The default has none
  2. Fill allowed_users, allowed_numbers or sender_whitelist before enabling a channel. An empty list accepts every sender
  3. Enable the Infection Check plugin when the agent reads mail, web pages or MCP results. It ships disabled
  4. Run v2.12 or later. It fixes a Telegram webhook authentication bypass and a WhatsApp media path traversal
  5. Call POST /api_message with the X-API-KEY header. The token changes when the UI login or password changes

Paseo

  1. Run the daemon on the machine that has your tools and credentials, and connect from the clients
  2. Script runs from the CLI for repeatable agent jobs

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Agent Zero or Paseo?

Paseo scores 62.1 (B) on agent readiness against Agent Zero's 46 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Agent Zero leads on reliability.

Are Agent Zero and Paseo open source?

Yes. Agent Zero is open source (MIT). Paseo is open source (Apache-2.0).

Other comparisons with Agent Zero or Paseo

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