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
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
| Category | Weight this run | IronClaw | LearnHarness | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 67 | 56 | IronClaw +11 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 74 | 63 | IronClaw +11 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 69 | 60 | IronClaw +9 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 66 | 52 | IronClaw +14 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 60 | 60 | even |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 74 | 71 | IronClaw +3 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 76 | 60 | IronClaw +16 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -2 | 0 | |
| Total | B 66.8/100 | C 59.3/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | IronClaw | LearnHarness |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Vendor | NEAR AI | Amos Blomqvist |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP | |
| Auth | OAuth or key | None |
| Pricing | Freemium | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT OR Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0-only |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-09-29 | 2026-10-29 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | |
| Popularity | 13k stars | 4.2k stars |
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (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
- Open Settings and turn off global auto-approve, or set send and delete tools to ask each time, before connecting mail or chat accounts
- Install with the release installer and run
ironclaw onboard. 1.x does not migrate 0.29 data, so use a fresh home directory - Call
POST /api/v1/responseswith the bearer token from~/.ironclaw/reborn/webui-token. Keep under 30 requests in 60 seconds - Resolve approval and OAuth gates in the web interface. The Responses API fails the turn instead of surfacing them
- Connect MCP servers over HTTP only. The stdio transport is rejected
LearnHarness
- Use the bundled skill (
skills/learnharness/SKILL.md) to read a learner's record. It needs Python 3.10 or later and writes nothing - Pass
--format jsonbefore the subcommand, for examplepython3 -B scripts/graph.py --format json propositions - Treat stored answer keys and teacher prose as model-authored. A proposition in the graph is not evidence the learner understood it
- Do not read
auth.json, which sits one folder above the data folder and holds provider keys in plain text - 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).
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Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/ironclaw-vs-learnharness.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/ironclaw.json·/api/v1/tools/learnharness.json - From a terminal
anchor compare ironclaw learnharness(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "ironclaw", "b": "learnharness"}at/mcp, no key