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

Caddy vs nanobot

nanobot scores 62.4 (B) on agent readiness against Caddy's 16.7 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. 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 nanobotHKUDS · Agent harness B62.4/100#446 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.

Also in its favour

  • 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 10
  • Schema & documentation, 77 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 74 against 0
  • Security & auth, 63 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 82 against 55

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 runCaddynanobotEdge
Reliability16%201070nanobot +60
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.21077nanobot +67
Agent ergonomics13%16.2074nanobot +74
Security & auth14%17.5063nanobot +63
Payments & pricing10%12.53060nanobot +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.85582nanobot +27
Transparency & trust7%8.85248Caddy +4
Negative events≤150-6
TotalF 16.7/100B 62.4/100

Facts side by side

FactCaddynanobot
KindPlatformAgent harness
VendorCaddy Technologies Inc.HKUDS
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthOAuth or keyNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceClosed service under Caddy's Terms of Service (Caddy Technologies Inc., last updated 27 April 2026).MIT
Read-only variant documentedyesno
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-132026-09-15
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

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.

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

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.

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, Caddy or nanobot?

nanobot scores 62.4 (B) on agent readiness against Caddy's 16.7 (F), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories.

Are Caddy and nanobot open source?

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

Other comparisons with Caddy or nanobot

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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