Get an audit

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

Boba vs IronClaw

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Boba's 10.3 (F), and leads in every scored category. Both do assistants reached by message.

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

Bobahumans& ai, inc. · Platform F10.3/100#1004 of 1010 IronClawNEAR AI · Agent harness B66.7/100#288 of 1010

Which one, for what

Boba F

Best for Groups who want a free assistant inside a shared chat for planning, drafting and images.

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

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

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

  • Reliability, 67 against 15
  • Schema & documentation, 74 against 0
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 0
  • Security & auth, 66 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 74 against 2
  • Transparency & trust, 75 against 39

Also in its favour

  • Open source

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 runBobaIronClawEdge
Reliability16%201567IronClaw +52
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.2074IronClaw +74
Agent ergonomics13%16.2069IronClaw +69
Security & auth14%17.5066IronClaw +66
Payments & pricing10%12.53060IronClaw +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8274IronClaw +72
Transparency & trust7%8.83975IronClaw +36
Negative events≤150-2
TotalF 10.3/100B 66.7/100

Facts side by side

FactBobaIronClaw
KindPlatformAgent harness
Vendorhumans& ai, inc.NEAR AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceClosed service under Boba's Terms of Service (humans& ai, inc., last updated 5 October 2026).MIT OR Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last releasenone2026-09-29
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno date given
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Popularitynone13k stars

Verdicts

Boba

Boba is a free texting assistant for one-to-one and group chats over iMessage, RCS and SMS, started by sending one message with no card or app. No outside agent can call it, its privacy notice uses inputs and outputs to train its models with no opt-out found, and no status page or security contact was found.

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

Boba

  1. Don't plan to call Boba from another agent. It answers only text messages in the Messages app.
  2. Tell people in a group chat that messages sent to Boba may be used to train its models.

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, Boba or IronClaw?

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Boba's 10.3 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Are Boba and IronClaw open source?

No open-source release is listed for Boba. IronClaw is open source (MIT OR Apache-2.0).

Other comparisons with Boba or IronClaw

Disclosure

Boba 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.

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.

Get an auditSee a sample report