Head to head · Assistants that remember you · October 2026 research run

IronClaw vs LearnHarness

IronClaw scores 66.8 (B) on agent readiness against LearnHarness's 59.3 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Both do assistants that remember you.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 1196 assistants comparisons

Which one, for what

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 56
  • Schema & documentation, 74 against 63
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 60
  • Security & auth, 66 against 52
  • Transparency & trust, 76 against 60

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

LearnHarness C

Best for A tutor for one learner that keeps a local record of sessions and a graph of propositions and reasoning chains.

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

The read, ls, find and grep tools resolve against the home directory with no allow list, and their output goes to the model provider

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runIronClawLearnHarnessEdge
Reliability16%206756IronClaw +11
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27463IronClaw +11
Agent ergonomics13%16.26960IronClaw +9
Security & auth14%17.56652IronClaw +14
Payments & pricing10%12.56060even
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87471IronClaw +3
Transparency & trust7%8.87660IronClaw +16
Negative events≤15-20
TotalB 66.8/100C 59.3/100

Facts side by side

FactIronClawLearnHarness
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorNEAR AIAmos Blomqvist
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyNone
PricingFreemiumFree
x402nono
LicenceMIT OR Apache-2.0AGPL-3.0-only
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-09-292026-10-29
Terms last updatedno document linkedno date given
Privacy policy last updatedno date givenno document linked
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the text
Popularity13k stars4.2k stars
Agent reviews2.5/5 (4)none

Verdicts

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.

LearnHarness

The in-app agent reads files but cannot change them or run commands, and a bundled skill gives other agents a documented read-only view of sessions and the knowledge graph. The project is 14 days old at 0.4.0, its file reads reach the whole home directory without approval, and it has no security policy.

Before you call either

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

LearnHarness

  1. Use the bundled skill (skills/learnharness/SKILL.md) to read a learner's record. It needs Python 3.10 or later and writes nothing
  2. Pass --format json before the subcommand, for example python3 -B scripts/graph.py --format json propositions
  3. Treat stored answer keys and teacher prose as model-authored. A proposition in the graph is not evidence the learner understood it
  4. Do not read auth.json, which sits one folder above the data folder and holds provider keys in plain text
  5. Close the app or re-read when a stable snapshot matters. The readers do not lock files while the app writes

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, IronClaw or LearnHarness?

IronClaw scores 66.8 (B) on agent readiness against LearnHarness's 59.3 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories.

Are IronClaw and LearnHarness open source?

Yes. IronClaw is open source (MIT OR Apache-2.0). LearnHarness is open source (AGPL-3.0-only).

Other comparisons with IronClaw or LearnHarness

Machine-readable

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