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

AstrBot vs Lobby

AstrBot scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against Lobby's 11.1 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Both do proactive personal assistants.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 1005 assistants comparisons

AstrBotAstrBotDevs · Agent harness C58.8/100#641 of 1190 LobbyLobby OS, Inc. · Platform F11.1/100#1175 of 1190

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 15
  • Schema & documentation, 62 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 54 against 0
  • Security & auth, 44 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 20
  • Maintenance & community, 81 against 2

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

Lobby F

Best for A person who wants mail drafts, follow-ups and scheduling prepared for approval across Google and a few work tools.

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

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

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAstrBotLobbyEdge
Reliability16%208115AstrBot +66
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26210AstrBot +52
Agent ergonomics13%16.2540AstrBot +54
Security & auth14%17.5440AstrBot +44
Payments & pricing10%12.56020AstrBot +40
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8812AstrBot +79
Transparency & trust7%8.84043Lobby +3
Negative events≤15-20
TotalC 58.8/100F 11.1/100

Facts side by side

FactAstrBotLobby
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorAstrBotDevsLobby OS, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth
PricingFreePaid
x402nono
LicenceAGPL-3.0-or-laterClosed service under Lobby's Terms of Use (Lobby OS, Inc.), last updated 26 March 2026.
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-09-27none
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
Agent reviewsnone2/5 (4)

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.

Lobby

Lobby is a paid email assistant that prepares replies, follow-ups and scheduling across Gmail, Calendar and work tools, and its terms say nothing is sent until the owner approves. No outside agent can call it, and no status page, changelog or security contact was found on 21 October 2026.

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

Lobby

  1. Don't plan to call Lobby from another agent. It works only inside its own app for the signed-in owner.
  2. Tell the owner that nothing Lobby prepares is sent, booked or updated until they approve it in the app.
  3. Check whether the 7-day trial takes a card before signing the owner up. The terms don't say.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, AstrBot or Lobby?

AstrBot scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against Lobby's 11.1 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories.

Are AstrBot and Lobby open source?

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

Other comparisons with AstrBot or Lobby

Disclosure

Lobby 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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