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Head to head · Proactive personal assistants · October 2026 research run

AstrBot vs Caddy

AstrBot scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against Caddy's 16.7 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Caddy leads on transparency & trust. Both do proactive personal assistants.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 834 assistants comparisons

AstrBotAstrBotDevs · Agent harness C58.8/100#585 of 1010 CaddyCaddy Technologies Inc. · Platform F16.7/100#996 of 1010

Which one, for what

AstrBot C

Best for Someone who wants one self-run bot answering on QQ, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Lark or WeCom, in private or group chats, with scheduled tasks, a knowledge base and plugins.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 81 against 10
  • Schema & documentation, 62 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 54 against 0
  • Security & auth, 44 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 81 against 55

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card
  • Open source

Watch for

No approval step before any tool call. The agent sends messages, creates scheduled tasks and calls MCP tools without asking

Caddy F

Best for People who want a free assistant in iMessage or RCS that watches mail, calendars and work tools and asks before acting.

Ahead on

  • Transparency & trust, 52 against 40

Watch for

No API, MCP server or A2A endpoint for an outside agent.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAstrBotCaddyEdge
Reliability16%208110AstrBot +71
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26210AstrBot +52
Agent ergonomics13%16.2540AstrBot +54
Security & auth14%17.5440AstrBot +44
Payments & pricing10%12.56030AstrBot +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88155AstrBot +26
Transparency & trust7%8.84052Caddy +12
Negative events≤15-20
TotalC 58.8/100F 16.7/100

Facts side by side

FactAstrBotCaddy
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorAstrBotDevsCaddy Technologies Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceAGPL-3.0-or-laterClosed service under Caddy's Terms of Service (Caddy Technologies Inc., last updated 27 April 2026).
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-09-272026-10-13
Terms last updated2026-01-12
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the text
Popularity42k starsnone

Verdicts

AstrBot

Fourteen official messaging adapters, scheduled tasks and scoped API keys come in one AGPL-3.0 program with releases most weeks. No tool call asks for approval, no mail, calendar or long-term memory connector is built in, and usage statistics, including the machine's hostname, are sent by default.

Caddy

Caddy is a free iMessage and RCS assistant in public beta that watches connected mail, calendars and work apps and asks before sending email or changing data. No outside agent can call it, and no status page, changelog or security contact was found, though its iOS app ships every week or two.

Before you call either

AstrBot

  1. Set ASTRBOT_DISABLE_METRICS=1 before the first start. Statistics, including the hostname, are sent to tickstats.soulter.top by default
  2. Set dashboard.host to 127.0.0.1 in data/cmd_config.json, or the DASHBOARD_HOST variable, unless remote access is intended. The default is 0.0.0.0
  3. Create an abk_ key in Settings, OpenAPI with only the scopes needed, and send it as Authorization: Bearer or X-API-Key
  4. Include username in every POST /api/v1/chat body. Without the chat:admin scope an administrator ID is rejected
  5. Check Extensions, Future Tasks after asking for a schedule. One-off tasks are deleted after their run even when the run fails

Caddy

  1. Don't plan to call Caddy from another agent. It answers the owner's text messages, Siri and group chats it's added to.
  2. Expect Caddy to ask the owner before it sends email or creates an invite.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, AstrBot or Caddy?

AstrBot scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against Caddy's 16.7 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Caddy leads on transparency & trust.

Are AstrBot and Caddy open source?

AstrBot is open source (AGPL-3.0-or-later). No open-source release is listed for Caddy.

Other comparisons with AstrBot or Caddy

Disclosure

Caddy competes with LocalGhost, which Anchor Terminal's founder builds. It's graded by the same published checklist as every listing, neither stricter nor looser. Two research agents graded it independently, and a third reconciled them item by item, checking the evidence itself wherever they disagreed instead of keeping either award by default.

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