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Head to head · Assistants reached by message · October 2026 research run

AstrBot vs Orchid

AstrBot scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against Orchid's 20.2 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Orchid leads on transparency & trust. Both do assistants reached by message.

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

AstrBotAstrBotDevs · Agent harness C58.8/100#585 of 1010 OrchidZero Email, Inc. · Platform F20.2/100#992 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 50
  • Schema & documentation, 62 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 54 against 0
  • Security & auth, 44 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 10
  • Maintenance & community, 81 against 24

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

Orchid F

Best for A founder or operator who wants Gmail and calendar triage by text with approval before anything leaves.

Ahead on

  • Transparency & trust, 60 against 40

Watch for

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

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAstrBotOrchidEdge
Reliability16%208150AstrBot +31
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26210AstrBot +52
Agent ergonomics13%16.2540AstrBot +54
Security & auth14%17.5440AstrBot +44
Payments & pricing10%12.56010AstrBot +50
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88124AstrBot +57
Transparency & trust7%8.84060Orchid +20
Negative events≤15-20
TotalC 58.8/100F 20.2/100

Facts side by side

FactAstrBotOrchid
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorAstrBotDevsZero Email, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreePaid
x402nono
LicenceAGPL-3.0-or-laterClosed service under Orchid's Terms of Service (Zero Email, Inc., last updated 16 January 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

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.

Orchid

Orchid is a paid executive assistant over iMessage, SMS and Telegram that holds drafts and calendar holds until the owner approves, with a public status page and a named subprocessor list. No outside agent can call it, there's no free tier, and its privacy policy allows training a personal model while its blog says it never trains.

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

Orchid

  1. Don't plan to call Orchid from another agent. It answers only the owner's iMessage, SMS and Telegram threads.
  2. Check status.orchid.ai before telling the owner Orchid is down. The 7 August incident moved it to a new number.
  3. Tell the owner that drafts and holds wait for their approval unless they widen it.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, AstrBot or Orchid?

AstrBot scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against Orchid's 20.2 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Orchid leads on transparency & trust.

Are AstrBot and Orchid open source?

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

Other comparisons with AstrBot or Orchid

Disclosure

Orchid 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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