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Head to head · Assistant proactive · October 2026 research run

IronClaw vs Lindy

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Lindy's 32.3 (F), and leads in every scored category. 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 LindyCrivello Corp (doing business as Lindy) · Platform F32.3/100#968 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 24
  • Schema & documentation, 74 against 32
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 43
  • Security & auth, 66 against 49
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 35
  • Maintenance & community, 74 against 9
  • Transparency & trust, 75 against 52

Also in its favour

  • Open source

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

Lindy F

Best for Lindy suits a person or small team that lives in Slack and Google or Microsoft mail and wants briefs, drafts, scheduling and meeting notes done on a schedule.

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

The integrations page says approval settings apply in shared Slack threads only. Web chat, Slack direct messages, iMessage and SMS are not covered, and reads are never covered.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runIronClawLindyEdge
Reliability16%206724IronClaw +43
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27432IronClaw +42
Agent ergonomics13%16.26943IronClaw +26
Security & auth14%17.56649IronClaw +17
Payments & pricing10%12.56035IronClaw +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8749IronClaw +65
Transparency & trust7%8.87552IronClaw +23
Negative events≤15-2-3
TotalB 66.7/100F 32.3/100

Facts side by side

FactIronClawLindy
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorNEAR AICrivello Corp (doing business as Lindy)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth
PricingFreemiumPaid
x402nono
LicenceMIT OR Apache-2.0Proprietary service under Lindy's Terms of Service. No source is published
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-292025-10-21
Terms last updatedno document linked2026-09-24
Privacy policy last updatedno date given2026-09-28
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyes
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes
Popularity13k starsnone

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.

Lindy

Lindy keeps what it remembers in files the owner can read and edit, and publishes credit prices. Its approval setting applies in shared Slack threads only, so writes asked for by direct message, text or web chat run unasked, which its pricing page does not say. It has no status page, and its changelog stops in October 2025.

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

Lindy

  1. Treat a request sent by direct message, text or web chat as unguarded. Approval prompts appear in shared Slack threads only.
  2. Run a routine as a dry run before turning it on. A dry run reads real data and sends, posts and writes nothing.
  3. Turn off unused tools after adding an MCP server. Every supported tool arrives switched on, and a large server adds more than a hundred.
  4. Expect a billed seat for anyone who mentions Lindy in Slack. A teammate who joins that way has seven free days first.
  5. Connect only hosted MCP servers on public HTTPS with streamable HTTP, the one kind the docs describe.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, IronClaw or Lindy?

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Lindy's 32.3 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Are IronClaw and Lindy open source?

IronClaw is open source (MIT OR Apache-2.0). No open-source release is listed for Lindy.

Other comparisons with IronClaw or Lindy

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