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Head to head · Assistant proactive · October 2026 research run

AstrBot vs IronClaw

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against AstrBot's 58.8 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. AstrBot leads on reliability and maintenance & community. Both do assistant proactive.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 190 assistants comparisons

AstrBotAstrBotDevs · Agent harness C58.8/100#584 of 986 IronClawNEAR AI · Agent harness B66.7/100#288 of 986

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 67
  • Maintenance & community, 81 against 74

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

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

IronClaw B

Best for One technical owner who wants a self-hosted assistant over Gmail, Calendar, Slack and Telegram with credentials kept out of the model's reach.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 74 against 62
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 54
  • Security & auth, 66 against 44
  • Transparency & trust, 75 against 40

Watch for

Global auto-approve defaults to on in the 1.4.1 source, so tools marked ask (send, trash, delete) run without a prompt. Only financial, approval and budget effects always ask

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAstrBotIronClawEdge
Reliability16%208167AstrBot +14
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26274IronClaw +12
Agent ergonomics13%16.25469IronClaw +15
Security & auth14%17.54466IronClaw +22
Payments & pricing10%12.56060even
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88174AstrBot +7
Transparency & trust7%8.84075IronClaw +35
Negative events≤15-2-2
TotalC 58.8/100B 66.7/100

Facts side by side

FactAstrBotIronClaw
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorAstrBotDevsNEAR AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceAGPL-3.0-or-laterMIT OR Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-09-272026-09-29
Terms last updated2026-01-12no document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno date given
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 stars13k stars

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.

IronClaw

Credentials stay in an encrypted store and are injected at the host boundary, and extensions declare per-tool permissions, network targets and OAuth scopes. The global auto-approve setting defaults to on in the 1.4.1 source, so tools marked ask, such as gmail.send_message, run unprompted until the owner turns it off.

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

IronClaw

  1. Open Settings and turn off global auto-approve, or set send and delete tools to ask each time, before connecting mail or chat accounts
  2. Install with the release installer and run ironclaw onboard. 1.x does not migrate 0.29 data, so use a fresh home directory
  3. Call POST /api/v1/responses with the bearer token from ~/.ironclaw/reborn/webui-token. Keep under 30 requests in 60 seconds
  4. Resolve approval and OAuth gates in the web interface. The Responses API fails the turn instead of surfacing them
  5. Connect MCP servers over HTTP only. The stdio transport is rejected

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, AstrBot or IronClaw?

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against AstrBot's 58.8 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. AstrBot leads on reliability and maintenance & community.

Are AstrBot and IronClaw open source?

Yes. AstrBot is open source (AGPL-3.0-or-later). IronClaw is open source (MIT OR Apache-2.0).

Other comparisons with AstrBot or IronClaw

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