Head to head · Multi-agent orchestration · October 2026 research run

Clawboo vs Harness

Clawboo scores 61.4 (C) on agent readiness against Harness's 60 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Harness leads on agent ergonomics, maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do multi-agent orchestration.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 955 harnesses comparisons

Which one, for what

Clawboo C

Best for One person on one computer who wants several coding and general agents on one board, with shared memory and a lead agent that routes work.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 52 against 35
  • Security & auth, 70 against 57
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 40

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it

Watch for

Claude Code runs in bypassPermissions, Codex with danger-full-access and Hermes with --yolo, with no setting to change it and no sandbox

Harness C

Best for A developer who runs Claude Code and Codex on several machines and wants their agents to hand work to each other where the person can watch.

Ahead on

  • Agent ergonomics, 82 against 75
  • Maintenance & community, 60 against 51
  • Transparency & trust, 64 against 58

Also in its favour

  • Runs on your own machine
  • No incidents deducted, where Clawboo loses 4 points for them

Watch for

Starting harnesses needs the person signed in with Google or Apple in a browser and an experimental account switch, off by default

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Payments & pricing Clawboo +20

Clawboo 60

No payment protocol (0). Read with the self-hosted rule. Free under MIT with nothing to buy (20). No card and no Clawboo account (20). One npx command installs and starts it with no sign-up (20). Model costs belong to the providers the owner connects.

Harness 40

No payment protocol (0). Read with the self-hosted rule. The software is free and the optional hardware prices are public (20). Free with no card (20). An agent cannot start harnesses until the person signs in with Google or Apple in a browser and turns on the experimental switch, so 0 for autonomous onboarding, as the other harnesses that need an account were read (0).

Reliability Clawboo +17

Clawboo 52

Read as local software. The official npm package clawboo states Node.js 22.12 or newer, and the README says macOS, Linux and Windows are supported (20). ci.yml runs lint, typecheck, Vitest and a real-concurrency suite on Linux and platform suites on Windows and macOS, and publish.yml reruns build, lint, typecheck, tests and a clean-install boot before it publishes. 0.5.0 carries provenance from that workflow on main, so its checks passed at that commit, but run results on main couldn't be read (15). github.com was unreachable, so open crash and regression issues are unchecked. A known-issues page lists 25 entries with a status each, three of them fixed on main (5). Changesets write a changelog entry per release, and removals and the 0.2.0 database reset are called out, though breaking changes arrive in minor versions before 1.0 (12). Version 0.5.0, and SECURITY.md says pre-1.0 (0).

Harness 35

Read as local software, since the agents run on the owner's machines. A one-line installer from Autonomous's CDN, DMG and AppImage builds, and App Store and Google Play apps, with macOS and Linux stated as supported and Node managed by the installer. Not on npm or a package registry (20). A public CI workflow runs the CLI suite in four shards, the desktop suite and typechecks, and the vendor's reliability run of 16 September 2026 reports 2,325 CLI, 370 backend and 1,686 desktop tests passing. We could not read CI run results, so credit for the suite only (10). Open issues could not be read, because GitHub's web pages and API were not reachable from our network. Unchecked, so scored absent (0). Tags follow semver per component, but there is no changelog for the app or CLI and breaking changes are not marked in the repository (5). The CLI agents call is 0.4.18 and the npm MCP package is 0.1.0 and unpublished. The desktop app is 1.2.89, but the agent surface is pre-1.0, and Agents can start other agents is an experiment (0). Accounts and the relay are hosted by Autonomous with no status page found.

Security & auth Clawboo +13

Clawboo 70

Harness reading of the framework checklist, as for the other harnesses. 30 for what leaves the machine by default, 20 for approvals and sandboxing, 15 for prompt-injection posture, 15 for audit and 20 for the security programme. The docs say Clawboo sends no telemetry and list the GitHub catalogue fetch, the npm version check, OpenRouter's public model list, Google Fonts and the GitHub star count, of which only the catalogue address can be changed (27). Clawboo Native shell commands are off by default and asked one at a time, and connector grants are per agent with approval on writes. Claude Code, Codex and Hermes run with their prompts and sandboxes off and no setting to change it, they can read Clawboo's database and key vault, and with no access token by default any local program can answer approval cards (8). Images in agent text don't load on their own, peer posts are marked as evidence, and a run that has read private data and untrusted content asks before any outbound connector call (11). An audit log of budget, breaker, approval, verification, tool-call and install events, with secrets masked (13). SECURITY.md with private reporting, CodeQL, Dependabot and npm provenance. No security.txt or bug bounty, OSV lists no advisory for clawboo, and the proxy advisory is on the docs with a workaround while its fix is unreleased (11).

Harness 57

Harness reading of the framework checklist, as for the other harnesses. 30 for what leaves the machine by default, 20 for approvals and sandboxing, 15 for prompt-injection posture, 15 for audit and 20 for the security programme. Product usage counts are on by default, disclosed with an opt-out and without prompts, code or files. Remote traffic is end-to-end encrypted and relays carry ciphertext. Local use needs no account. The daemon updates itself from a checksummed manifest without asking (18). Agents may start harnesses only after the person turns on an account switch that refuses an agent, with four live harnesses at most and closes limited to their own. Against that, installing Harness adds its commands to Claude Code's and Codex's allow rules, Codex runs them outside its sandbox, there is no sandbox of its own, and the device page lists spoken tasks as auto-allowed (13). The instructions tell an agent never to answer a harness's question or permission prompt and never to ask one to publish, deploy, delete or push. Harness output is another agent's text, and no further guidance on it was found (9). Every harness shows in the person's app with who started it, and the device key log keeps an add and remove history. No per-call audit log found (9). SECURITY.md with an email and a three-working-day acknowledgement, and a documented trust model. No security.txt, bug bounty or certification found (8).

Maintenance & community Harness +9

Clawboo 51

0.5.0 was published to npm on 21 October 2026 (30). Two releases in the 90 days to 1 November 2026, 0.4.0 on 28 September and 0.5.0, below the three the line asks for (0). github.com was unreachable, so replies to issues, pull requests and Discussions are unchecked. The CI file cites issue #140 as fixed (3). One public npm package, current, with no entry in the official MCP registry for its four servers (10). CI, CodeQL, weekly Dependabot and SLSA provenance on 0.4.0 and 0.5.0, with @composio/client pinned to an alpha (8).

Harness 60

v0.4.18_cli and v1.2.89_desktop on 17 October 2026 (30). 548 tags since 9 September 2026 (20). Pull requests numbered past #1,390 merge daily by the team, but issues and outside pull requests could not be read (5). Not in the official MCP registry, which returned nothing for autonomous-ai, although the repository has a server.json. The npm package it names was never published (0). CI workflows for the CLI, desktop, backend and OS, with dependency lockfiles current. Run results unread (5).

Agent ergonomics Harness +7

Clawboo 75

Harness reading, scored on what an agent or pipeline driving it has to supply. Four MCP servers keep tool lists small (12 Tasks tools, 4 Memory tools, 2 or 3 TeamChat tools, and Tools with four demonstration builtins plus granted connectors), Clawboo Native gets a read-only Tasks subset, and Tools results over 16 KiB are trimmed with a handle to read the rest (22). Circuit breakers stop task-runner runs after more than 30 tool calls or 200,000 tokens a minute, and team chat caps hand-offs at 8 a turn and three levels. Budgets warn only unless set to a hard cap, and a hard cap stops most runs only between runs (14). REST errors use one {error} shape, refused MCP calls return denied: with a reason prefix, and 429s carry Retry-After (16). claim_task and assign_task are atomic, illegal status changes are refused by name, the board survives restarts and routines resume after failure. No MCP tool annotations are documented (14). One npx command and a provider key or a local Ollama, but Claude Code teammates need a global install with the Agent SDK, and there is no client SDK (9).

Harness 82

Seven compact tools, six outside a harness, and server instructions of about 300 words (25). chars sizes a read (4,000 characters by default), all widens the list, and any returns on the first finished harness. No pagination (14). Documented exit codes, refusals returned as answers rather than errors so a model does not retry them, a timed-out wait reported as still working, and Next: on every answer (19). readOnlyHint on whoami, list, wait and read, destructiveHint false on start and send, idempotentHint on close, and a second start of the same name is answered as already starting (16). Two required fields on start, defaults of Claude Code and a 45-second wait. No SDK, but a CLI, an MCP server and a plugin with a skill (8).

Transparency & trust Harness +6

Clawboo 58

MIT, Copyright 2026 Sanreds, with a third-party notices file (30). The docs list every file Clawboo writes, which copies of keys are encrypted and which are plain text, retention for stored tool results (7 days) and pending approvals (24 hours), and that prompts go only to connected providers. There is no privacy statement, and the website wasn't read (22). The 0.1.x line is deprecated on npm with a note in the changelog, and removals are dated in release notes, with no written deprecation policy or notice period (10). No telemetry, with the server's own outbound requests disclosed, though the npm update check has no setting (18).

Harness 64

MIT licence for the whole repository under Autonomous, Inc., with third-party Store covers under their own licences (30). The repository documents what usage counts contain, a 10-day pseudonymous activity mark and the encrypted relay in detail. Autonomous's privacy policy of 7 July 2026 is general to its stores and sites and does not mention Harness (14). The provider protocol promises both revisions side by side for a deprecation window after a breaking change. Nothing similar for the app or CLI (6). Telemetry is disclosed with an opt-out in the app and CLI, but it is on by default and described in the repository rather than in the privacy policy (14).

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runClawbooHarnessEdge
Reliability16%205235Clawboo +17
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28385Harness +2
Agent ergonomics13%16.27582Harness +7
Security & auth14%17.57057Clawboo +13
Payments & pricing10%12.56040Clawboo +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.85160Harness +9
Transparency & trust7%8.85864Harness +6
Negative events≤15-40
TotalC 61.4/100C 60/100

Facts side by side

FactClawbooHarness
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorSanredsAutonomous, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transportsstdio
AuthNoneOAuth
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITMIT
Tools exposednone7
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-212026-10-17
Terms last updatedno document linkedno date given
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked2026-07-07
Customer content may train modelsnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot read yetyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot read yetyes
Arbitration or class-action waivernot read yetyes
Popularity100 npm/wk1.3k stars
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (4)

How the scores have moved

Clawboo

No score change since it was listed.

Harness

Verdicts

Clawboo

Tasks, memory, team chat and connectors are shared across five runtimes through four MCP servers, with documentation that states each default and limit. Claude Code, Codex and Hermes run with their sandboxes and approval prompts off and no setting to change it, and a reverse-proxy exposure of the MCP servers is fixed only on the unreleased main branch.

Harness

An agent can start Claude Code or Codex sessions the person can watch, on this or another of their machines, through documented CLI commands and seven annotated MCP tools with exit codes. Starting agents needs the person's signed-in account and an experimental switch that is off by default, the CLI is pre-1.0, and usage counts are shared by default.

Before you call either

Clawboo

  1. Run npx clawboo@latest, not a bare npx clawboo, which can reuse an older cached build. Node.js 22.12 or newer is required
  2. On 0.5.0 behind nginx, Caddy or a Cloudflare Tunnel, deny /api/mcp/ at the proxy and set STUDIO_ACCESS_TOKEN from openssl rand -hex 24
  3. Give Claude Code, Codex and Hermes teammates only work you would let run unattended, or run Clawboo under a separate user account or VM
  4. Create a hard-cap budget in Settings > Insights > Governance before long runs. A fresh install has no budget and new budgets only warn
  5. Install @anthropic-ai/claude-agent-sdk globally beside Clawboo for Claude Code teammates. A one-off npx run cannot load it

Harness

  1. Run harness whoami first. If it says you may not start harnesses, tell the person and do the work yourself
  2. Ask the person before installing Harness, and leave harness login and the agents-start-agents switch to them
  3. Treat exit 5 as final and do not retry. Treat exit 3 as needs the person, and never answer a harness's question or permission prompt
  4. Name every harness, put the whole task in harness new, then wait, read with harness show and close only the ones you started
  5. Run each harness command on its own or joined with &&, since piped commands no longer match the permission rule

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Clawboo or Harness?

Clawboo scores 61.4 (C) on agent readiness against Harness's 60 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Harness leads on agent ergonomics, maintenance & community and transparency & trust.

Are Clawboo and Harness open source?

Yes. Clawboo is open source (MIT). Harness is open source (MIT).

Other comparisons with Clawboo or Harness

Machine-readable

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