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Head to head · Assistant proactive · October 2026 research run

IronClaw vs Leon

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Leon's 41 (E), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Both do assistant proactive.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 190 assistants comparisons

IronClawNEAR AI · Agent harness B66.7/100#288 of 986 LeonLouis Grenard (Leon AI) · Agent harness E41/100#934 of 986

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 32
  • Schema & documentation, 74 against 33
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 57
  • Security & auth, 66 against 34
  • Maintenance & community, 74 against 15
  • Transparency & trust, 75 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

Leon E

Best for A developer who wants a self-hosted assistant with memory, computer use and a local model, and who will read the source.

Also in its favour

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

Watch for

No tagged release of the core since 1.0.0-beta.8 on 1 May 2023. The 2.0 Developer Preview is installed by cloning the develop branch

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runIronClawLeonEdge
Reliability16%206732IronClaw +35
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27433IronClaw +41
Agent ergonomics13%16.26957IronClaw +12
Security & auth14%17.56634IronClaw +32
Payments & pricing10%12.56060even
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87415IronClaw +59
Transparency & trust7%8.87560IronClaw +15
Negative events≤15-20
TotalB 66.7/100E 41/100

Facts side by side

FactIronClawLeon
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorNEAR AILouis Grenard (Leon AI)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyNone
PricingFreemiumFree
x402nono
LicenceMIT OR Apache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-09-292023-05-01
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno date givenno 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
Popularity13k stars18k stars

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.

Leon

Connected-app credentials are encrypted per profile and the Gmail connection is read-only. The 2.0 Developer Preview has no tagged release, runs tools and a 30-minute proactive pulse with no approval step, listens on every network interface with client authentication off, and sends telemetry by default.

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

Leon

  1. Clone the develop branch for 2.0. npm install --global @leon-ai/cli and docs.getleon.ai install and describe the legacy 1.0 betas
  2. Set client_interface.auth.enabled: true and a LEON_PROFILE_TOKEN before the machine joins a shared network. The server binds 0.0.0.0
  3. Set telemetry_enabled: false and runtime.pulse_enabled: false in the profile config.yml for an unattended or private run
  4. Use availability.tools.allowed to limit tools. Shell, file writes, computer use and browser control are otherwise available to the agent with no approval prompt
  5. Back up LEON_CONNECTIONS_ENCRYPTION_KEY from the profile .env. Without it the stored connections cannot be read

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, IronClaw or Leon?

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Leon's 41 (E), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories.

Are IronClaw and Leon open source?

Yes. IronClaw is open source (MIT OR Apache-2.0). Leon is open source (MIT).

Other comparisons with IronClaw or Leon

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