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

AstrBot vs Town

AstrBot scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against Town's 48.7 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Town leads on security & auth and 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 TownTown.com, Inc. · Platform D48.7/100#834 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 35
  • Schema & documentation, 62 against 33
  • Agent ergonomics, 54 against 49
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 81 against 60

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

Town D

Best for An owner who wants a mail and calendar assistant whose routines other systems can trigger.

Ahead on

  • Security & auth, 79 against 44
  • Transparency & trust, 63 against 40

Watch for

The privacy policy describes training with an opt-out and the trust page says training is opt-in.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAstrBotTownEdge
Reliability16%208135AstrBot +46
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26233AstrBot +29
Agent ergonomics13%16.25449AstrBot +5
Security & auth14%17.54479Town +35
Payments & pricing10%12.56030AstrBot +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88160AstrBot +21
Transparency & trust7%8.84063Town +23
Negative events≤15-20
TotalC 58.8/100D 48.7/100

Facts side by side

FactAstrBotTown
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorAstrBotDevsTown.com, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceAGPL-3.0-or-laterClosed service under Town's Terms of Service (Town.com, Inc., updated 21 July 2026).
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-272026-10-10
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.

Town

Town is a hosted assistant that works across the owner's mail, calendar and work apps, and other systems can start its routines through per-routine webhooks with rotatable secrets, idempotency keys and documented errors. A caller can't read a run's result. The privacy policy and trust page disagree on whether training is on by default.

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

Town

  1. Start a Town routine with POST to its webhook URL, Authorization Bearer whsec_ secret, and application/json or text/plain. Expect 202 only.
  2. Send X-Town-Idempotency-Key with a stable event id on every retry so Town doesn't start a second run.
  3. Treat 404 as wrong secret, disabled endpoint or missing endpoint alike, and ask the owner to check Routine Settings rather than retrying.
  4. Send account_email only if the owner allowed the override. It must match a connected account in full and can't widen the routine's scope.
  5. Ask the owner to keep routines that act on webhook input in approval-required mode, as Town's own docs advise.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, AstrBot or Town?

AstrBot scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against Town's 48.7 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Town leads on security & auth and transparency & trust.

Are AstrBot and Town open source?

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

Other comparisons with AstrBot or Town

Disclosure

Town 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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