Head to head · Self-hosted personal assistants · October 2026 research run

AstrBot vs LearnHarness

LearnHarness and AstrBot score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 59.3 (C) and 59 (C). AstrBot leads on reliability and maintenance & community. Both do self-hosted personal assistants.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 1196 assistants comparisons

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 56
  • Maintenance & community, 81 against 71

Watch for

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

LearnHarness C

Best for A tutor for one learner that keeps a local record of sessions and a graph of propositions and reasoning chains.

Ahead on

  • Agent ergonomics, 60 against 54
  • Security & auth, 52 against 44
  • Transparency & trust, 60 against 42

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it

Watch for

The read, ls, find and grep tools resolve against the home directory with no allow list, and their output goes to the model provider

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAstrBotLearnHarnessEdge
Reliability16%208156AstrBot +25
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26263LearnHarness +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.25460LearnHarness +6
Security & auth14%17.54452LearnHarness +8
Payments & pricing10%12.56060even
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88171AstrBot +10
Transparency & trust7%8.84260LearnHarness +18
Negative events≤15-20
TotalC 59/100C 59.3/100

Facts side by side

FactAstrBotLearnHarness
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorAstrBotDevsAmos Blomqvist
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceAGPL-3.0-or-laterAGPL-3.0-only
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-272026-10-29
Terms last updated2026-01-12no date given
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the textnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textnot found in the text
Popularity42k stars4.2k 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.

LearnHarness

The in-app agent reads files but cannot change them or run commands, and a bundled skill gives other agents a documented read-only view of sessions and the knowledge graph. The project is 14 days old at 0.4.0, its file reads reach the whole home directory without approval, and it has no security policy.

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

LearnHarness

  1. Use the bundled skill (skills/learnharness/SKILL.md) to read a learner's record. It needs Python 3.10 or later and writes nothing
  2. Pass --format json before the subcommand, for example python3 -B scripts/graph.py --format json propositions
  3. Treat stored answer keys and teacher prose as model-authored. A proposition in the graph is not evidence the learner understood it
  4. Do not read auth.json, which sits one folder above the data folder and holds provider keys in plain text
  5. Close the app or re-read when a stable snapshot matters. The readers do not lock files while the app writes

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, AstrBot or LearnHarness?

LearnHarness and AstrBot score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 59.3 (C) and 59 (C). AstrBot leads on reliability and maintenance & community.

Are AstrBot and LearnHarness open source?

Yes. AstrBot is open source (AGPL-3.0-or-later). LearnHarness is open source (AGPL-3.0-only).

Other comparisons with AstrBot or LearnHarness

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.