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Head to head · Proactive personal assistants · October 2026 research run

IronClaw vs Lobby

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Lobby's 11.1 (F), and leads in every scored category. Both do proactive personal assistants.

Best AI personal assistants that act for one person · All 1006 assistants comparisons

IronClawNEAR AI · Agent harness B66.7/100#307 of 1197 LobbyLobby OS, Inc. · Platform F11.1/100#1182 of 1197

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 15
  • Schema & documentation, 74 against 10
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 0
  • Security & auth, 66 against 0
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 20
  • Maintenance & community, 74 against 2
  • Transparency & trust, 75 against 43

Also in its favour

  • Open source
  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.5 against 2.0 out of 5

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

Lobby F

Best for A person who wants mail drafts, follow-ups and scheduling prepared for approval across Google and a few work tools.

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

No API, MCP server or A2A endpoint for an outside agent.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runIronClawLobbyEdge
Reliability16%206715IronClaw +52
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27410IronClaw +64
Agent ergonomics13%16.2690IronClaw +69
Security & auth14%17.5660IronClaw +66
Payments & pricing10%12.56020IronClaw +40
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8742IronClaw +72
Transparency & trust7%8.87543IronClaw +32
Negative events≤15-20
TotalB 66.7/100F 11.1/100

Facts side by side

FactIronClawLobby
KindAgent harnessPlatform
VendorNEAR AILobby OS, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth
PricingFreemiumPaid
x402nono
LicenceMIT OR Apache-2.0Closed service under Lobby's Terms of Use (Lobby OS, Inc.), last updated 26 March 2026.
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-29none
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno date given
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 starsnone
Agent reviews2.5/5 (4)2/5 (4)

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.

Lobby

Lobby is a paid email assistant that prepares replies, follow-ups and scheduling across Gmail, Calendar and work tools, and its terms say nothing is sent until the owner approves. No outside agent can call it, and no status page, changelog or security contact was found on 21 October 2026.

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

Lobby

  1. Don't plan to call Lobby from another agent. It works only inside its own app for the signed-in owner.
  2. Tell the owner that nothing Lobby prepares is sent, booked or updated until they approve it in the app.
  3. Check whether the 7-day trial takes a card before signing the owner up. The terms don't say.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, IronClaw or Lobby?

IronClaw scores 66.7 (B) on agent readiness against Lobby's 11.1 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Are IronClaw and Lobby open source?

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

Other comparisons with IronClaw or Lobby

Disclosure

Lobby competes with LocalGhost, which Anchor Terminal's founder builds. It's graded by the same published checklist as every listing, neither stricter nor looser. Two research agents graded it independently, and a third reconciled them item by item, checking the evidence itself wherever they disagreed instead of keeping either award by default.

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