Get an audit

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

AstrBot vs folk

AstrBot scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against folk's 19.8 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. folk 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 folkNozomio, Inc. · Platform F19.8/100#993 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 25
  • Schema & documentation, 62 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 54 against 0
  • Security & auth, 44 against 3
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 81 against 35

Also in its favour

  • Open source

Watch for

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

folk F

Best for People who want a texting companion for habits, workouts, study and money goals, with a free tier.

Ahead on

  • Transparency & trust, 67 against 40

Watch for

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

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAstrBotfolkEdge
Reliability16%208125AstrBot +56
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26210AstrBot +52
Agent ergonomics13%16.2540AstrBot +54
Security & auth14%17.5443AstrBot +41
Payments & pricing10%12.56030AstrBot +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88135AstrBot +46
Transparency & trust7%8.84067folk +27
Negative events≤15-20
TotalC 58.8/100F 19.8/100

Facts side by side

FactAstrBotfolk
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorAstrBotDevsNozomio, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceAGPL-3.0-or-laterClosed service under folk's terms (Nozomio, Inc., last updated 8 September 2026).
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-09-272026-10-12
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.

folk

folk is a texting accountability assistant with its own cloud computer, a free tier with no card and a privacy policy that rules out training on user data. No outside agent can call it, no status page or changelog was found, and its llms.txt and pricing file disagree on free limits and Max's price.

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

folk

  1. Don't plan to call folk from another agent. It answers only the owner's iMessage, Telegram or WhatsApp thread and iPhone app.
  2. Quote limits and prices from pricing.md and the terms, and note that llms.txt gives different free-tier limits.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, AstrBot or folk?

AstrBot scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against folk's 19.8 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. folk leads on transparency & trust.

Are AstrBot and folk open source?

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

Other comparisons with AstrBot or folk

Disclosure

folk 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.

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.

Get an auditSee a sample report