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

Caddy vs IronClaw

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Caddy's 16.7 (F), and leads in every scored category. Both do proactive personal assistants.

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

CaddyCaddy Technologies Inc. · Platform F16.7/100#996 of 1010 IronClawNEAR AI · Agent harness B66.7/100#288 of 1010

Which one, for what

Caddy F

Best for People who want a free assistant in iMessage or RCS that watches mail, calendars and work tools and asks before acting.

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.

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 10
  • Schema & documentation, 74 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 0
  • Security & auth, 66 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 74 against 55
  • Transparency & trust, 75 against 52

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 runCaddyIronClawEdge
Reliability16%201067IronClaw +57
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.21074IronClaw +64
Agent ergonomics13%16.2069IronClaw +69
Security & auth14%17.5066IronClaw +66
Payments & pricing10%12.53060IronClaw +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.85574IronClaw +19
Transparency & trust7%8.85275IronClaw +23
Negative events≤150-2
TotalF 16.7/100B 66.7/100

Facts side by side

FactCaddyIronClaw
KindPlatformAgent harness
VendorCaddy Technologies Inc.NEAR AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceClosed service under Caddy's Terms of Service (Caddy Technologies Inc., last updated 27 April 2026).MIT OR Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentedyesno
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-132026-09-29
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

Caddy

Caddy is a free iMessage and RCS assistant in public beta that watches connected mail, calendars and work apps and asks before sending email or changing data. No outside agent can call it, and no status page, changelog or security contact was found, though its iOS app ships every week or two.

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

Caddy

  1. Don't plan to call Caddy from another agent. It answers the owner's text messages, Siri and group chats it's added to.
  2. Expect Caddy to ask the owner before it sends email or creates an invite.

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, Caddy or IronClaw?

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Caddy's 16.7 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Are Caddy and IronClaw open source?

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

Other comparisons with Caddy or IronClaw

Disclosure

Caddy 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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