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

Brea vs nanobot

nanobot scores 62.4 (B) on agent readiness against Brea's 12.9 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Both do assistants reached by message.

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

BreaBrea AI LLC · Platform F12.9/100#1001 of 1010 nanobotHKUDS · Agent harness B62.4/100#446 of 1010

Which one, for what

Brea F

Best for An iPhone user who wants an assistant across many apps and websites with per-action approval.

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card
  • No incidents deducted, where nanobot loses 6 points for them

Watch for

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

nanobot B

Best for A technical owner who wants an assistant on their own machine across many chat apps, with file-based memory and a free choice of model.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 70 against 15
  • Schema & documentation, 77 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 74 against 0
  • Security & auth, 63 against 7
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 20
  • Maintenance & community, 82 against 4

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Open source

Watch for

No per-action approval was found in the docs or source. The agent sends messages, runs shell commands and edits files without asking

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBreananobotEdge
Reliability16%201570nanobot +55
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.21077nanobot +67
Agent ergonomics13%16.2074nanobot +74
Security & auth14%17.5763nanobot +56
Payments & pricing10%12.52060nanobot +40
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8482nanobot +78
Transparency & trust7%8.84848even
Negative events≤150-6
TotalF 12.9/100B 62.4/100

Facts side by side

FactBreananobot
KindPlatformAgent harness
VendorBrea AI LLCHKUDS
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyNone
PricingFreemiumFree
x402nono
LicenceClosed service under Brea's terms (Brea AI LLC, last updated 2 July 2026).MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last releasenone2026-09-15
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Popularitynone49k stars

Verdicts

Brea

Brea is an iMessage assistant with a free plan that needs no card, approval by reply before it sends, deletes or pays, and one-time Link cards for purchases. No outside agent can call it, paid prices sit inside the app, and no changelog or subprocessor list was found.

nanobot

nanobot runs on the owner's machine under the MIT licence, with no telemetry found in its source and memory kept as files the owner can read and restore. No per-action approval step was found, and the shell sandbox and workspace restriction are off by default. Five security advisories were published between March and September 2026, all with fixes.

Before you call either

Brea

  1. Don't plan to call Brea from another agent. It answers only the owner's iMessage thread.
  2. Tell the owner that replying ALWAYS stops Brea asking again for that action.

nanobot

  1. Set tools.restrictToWorkspace to true and tools.exec.sandbox to bwrap or seatbelt before giving it real accounts. Both are off by default
  2. Run 0.3.0 or later. Earlier versions carry the published SSRF flaw in web fetch (GHSA-vc5v-6vwm-wf9m)
  3. Keep allowFrom narrow on every channel and never set ["*"] on Email, which has no pairing
  4. Write secrets as ${VAR} references in ~/.nanobot/config.json. Plain values are stored in clear text
  5. Use nanobot -m "..." for a one-shot run, and keep nanobot gateway running for channels, schedules and heartbeat

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Brea or nanobot?

nanobot scores 62.4 (B) on agent readiness against Brea's 12.9 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories.

Are Brea and nanobot open source?

No open-source release is listed for Brea. nanobot is open source (MIT).

Other comparisons with Brea or nanobot

Disclosure

Brea 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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